I wanted a simple, low-resource solution for hosting and embedding small videos—ideally something lightweight, easy to deploy, and self-contained. After some research, I settled on PeerTube.

Requirements

My main criteria were:

• Easy to deploy via Docker
• Supports embedding videos and playlists in external blogs
• Supports both individual video uploads and playlist grouping
• Low resource usage (ideally with 512 -1 GB of RAM)
• Enables video downloads
• (Optional) Transcoding support for adaptive quality streaming

Evaluated Options

After testing several platforms, here’s a quick overview of the ones I ruled out:

• MediaCMS
  • Polished and feature-rich, but too resource-intensive. Even with transcoding disabled, I couldn’t upload a 10MB video when RAM was capped at 512MB.
• Clipbucket
  • The video player lacked visible controls. I didn’t investigate further due to this basic issue.
• Owncast
  • Appears tailored primarily for live streaming rather than static video hosting.
• Emby
  • Lacks a built-in public-facing frontend - at least with the docker setup. I didn’t want to spend extra time configuring one.

Final Choice: PeerTube

I ultimately chose Peertube. It runs smoothly with just 512MB RAM (without transcoding), satisfies all my key requirements, and offers a clean, minimal interface. For lightweight, self-hosted video streaming with Docker, it struck the right balance between simplicity and functionality.

• Docker