I'm programming a blogging platform and would ideally like to allow users to upload videos to show on their blogs. However, even though I've been developing web applications for years, I'm not familiar with video hosting, converting, etc. My question is, how hard is it and what are the costs involved? Are there easy ways to do this? Would I have to write conversion routines and dynamically create objects to embed in my html, or are there 3rd party solutions to make this easier? I'm trying to decide if this is feasible or if I should just sadly only allow embedded videos. Any input or guidelines to get started would be appreciated!
Implementing your own video hosting infrastructure is most likely going to take more money and time than would ever be worthwhile. A better idea would be to use something like YouTube's API to upload videos from your server. With the API, you can allow users to upload the file to your site, and then subsequently hand the video to YouTube and generate the appropriate embed code dynamically.
https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_direct_uploading