Freshpaint Video Platform
Freshpaint's most reliable video solution: self-hosted for full control, stability, and HIPAA compliance.
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Freshpaint's most reliable video solution: self-hosted for full control, stability, and HIPAA compliance.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Freshpaint Video is a self-hosted video streaming solution for you to use in the place of a third party video hosting platform like YouTube or Vimeo. On a high level, it takes source videos uploaded from customers, encodes them into streaming formats, and serves them to your end-users via an embedded video player which can be dropped into your websites.
Serving embedded videos from platforms like YouTube and Vimeo on your websites without a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) may present a risk of violating HIPAA. This is because these upstream hosts collect data about the user when serving these videos.
Let's take Vimeo for example. With the out-of-the-box Vimeo embed, the end user’s computer will download the video directly from Vimeo's servers. This will expose data about the user, such as their IP address, to Vimeo. If the user is viewing a video about a specific medical condition, Vimeo will have both an identifier (IP address) and health information about the user resulting in exposed Protected Health Information (PHI).
By using Freshpaint Video to host your embedded videos, you can continue serving content on your website without sharing PHI or any unintended data with third-party hosting platforms. Since Freshpaint Video operates entirely within the Freshpaint technology ecosystem, all data collection remains securely covered under your BAA with Freshpaint.
First, you'll need to transfer your videos to the Freshpaint ecosystem. Follow the steps below using the Freshpaint Video management UI. If you have any questions or feedback regarding this process, please reach out to us support@freshpaint.io.
If your team doesn't have access to the source video files or anticipates any issues uploading them to Freshpaint, please reach out to us at support@freshpaint.io.
Click "Upload Video" in the management UI
Choose a file, click upload and wait for the file to finish uploading
Give the video a title and description and add a custom thumbnail image, if desired. If you do not select a thumbnail image, one will be automatically generated which can be replaced at any time.
Optionally, upload captions for the video. Captions must be in the .vtt file format. The label is a readable name represented in the video player. The language code for the caption must represent a valid IETF language tag.
Videos that have just been uploaded will initially be in the "processing" state while Freshpaint encodes the video and prepares it for use in web streaming. This typically takes 5–15 minutes depending on the size of the video.
That's it! Once your video files are uploaded to Freshpaint, all you'll need to do is install the embedded videos onto your application.
This process may differ depending on your setup. For example, if your team is able to directly edit HTML, or use a CMS for this purpose, all they'd need to do is place the Freshpaint Video embed code that's provided on your application.
If you currently have a YouTube player or similar embedded on your site, you can simply replace the src in the iframe with the Freshpaint URL. This will maintain the same settings, such as player size.
You can retrieve the thumbnail for a video by adding /thumbnail to the end of the Freshpaint Video Link.
Please reach out to support@freshpaint.io for any assistance needed.
Our video player supports all boolean attributes natively supported in HTML5, including autoplay, muted, loop, and more. To take advantage of this, simply add the boolean parameter as a query parameter to the video URL (for example https://freshpaint-video.com/<env_id>/<video_id>?autoplay=1).
Modern browsers have special rules about when videos can be automatically played (see more in the Mozilla Autoplay Guide). Most follow the rule of only allowing autoplay if the video is muted by default. To set that up, append ?autoplay=1&muted=1at the end of your embedded video URL.
What are supported file formats and encodings?
We support all video encodings supported by AWS MediaConvert (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/latest/ug/supported-containers-codecs-details.html). The container extensions we look for on upload are ".3gp", ".3g2", ".wmv", ".avi", ".flv", ".mkv", ".mov", ".mp4", ".mpeg", ".mpg", ".mp1", ".mpv", ".mxf", ".webm".
Are there request rate limits?
No, we currently have no throttling here. In practice all our customers have pretty low traffic; it's likely not something we want to be forever unlimited, but at the moment it's not costing enough to put anything into place.
Is there support for adaptive rendering, like based on network bandwidth, viewport etc.,?
Yes, we use ABR streaming via HLS and DASH, the two most common ABR formats on the web. We generate variable quality streams based on the upload quality (this is automatically done by MediaConvert), and our player selects the appropriate stream. We don't currently have functionality to manually switch stream quality.
Does Freshpaint use any CDN to deliver hosted videos?
Yes, AWS CloudFront.
Can the datalayer capture usage and interaction of video?
We don't currently expose any of this to customers directly (and building that got deprioritized internally), but we do offer integration with GA4 for forwarding interactions.
Is it possible to add/edit metadata for videos and what is the current schema. Can custom metadata attributes be added?
The video's title, description, and thumbnail are included as metadata in the player HTML. The list of tags we populate is: "title" "description" "og:url" "og:title" "og:description" "og:video:url" "og:video:secure_url" "og:updated_time" "og:image" "og:image:secure_url" "og:image:type" "twitter:player" "twitter:url" "twitter:title" "twitter:description" "twitter:image" (note that many of these are populated with identical values), which is sufficient for the majority of web crawlers, social media embeds, and CMS platforms to recognize the video. We do not support customizing or adding additional metadata tags to the video beyond the title, description, and thumbnail.
Are you able to send video engagement events to Google Analytics 4?
Yes, engagement events such as video_start, video_progress, and video_complete for videos hosted in Freshpaint can be optionally enabled to be sent to GA4. Please click here to learn how to configure the GA4 destination to receive these events.
