How can I host videos on my site in the most privacy-respecting way possible? That question has circled around in my mind ever since I moved the site to a new web host a few months ago. I think I’ve found a good solution now.
Most of the videos on our site have been hosted by VideoPress for years now. It integrates directly with WordPress seamlessly and makes the process of posting them extremely easy. The problem is that there is a certain amount of analytics built into their pipeline that is unavoidable.
So I’m in the process of switching everything over to Bunny.net. The setup requires some manual tweaking, but I can set up Bunny.net to discard logs and even replace any IP address logs with 0.0.0.0, effectively making all requests anonymous. The only problem was that the built-in player that they provide does involve some analytics. That’s were hls.js comes in!
Hls.js is an open-source script that I can self-host that acts as a direct player for the streaming video data. With this implementation, there is virtually no tracking whatsoever, except for an IP address log (which is anonymized and deleted).
This level of scrutiny is probably overkill for a small site like this one, but I love digging into these kinds of technical challenges.