TypeScript · Go
In progress
StreamForge
Course and video hosting with adaptive HLS delivery, on free tiers
All three services scaffolded and implemented in part
Overview
A personal course and video hosting platform: a creator-style catalogue with adaptive HLS delivery, designed to run within free tiers. Upload a master video, a Go and FFmpeg worker transcodes it into a 360p/720p/1080p HLS ladder, the segments land in object storage, and an hls.js player streams them behind JWT auth and enrollment checks.
The architecture is shaped by one hard constraint: Cloudflare Workers cannot run FFmpeg, with no native binaries and strict CPU limits. So transcoding lives off-platform in Docker while everything else stays Cloudflare-native.
Stack
- Frontend
- Astro + hls.js on Cloudflare Pages
- API
- TypeScript + Hono on Cloudflare Workers
- Database
- D1 (SQLite) with Drizzle ORM
- Object storage
- R2 over the S3 API; MinIO locally
- Transcoder
- Go + FFmpeg in Docker
Decisions Worth Explaining
Transcoding lives off Cloudflare
Workers cannot execute FFmpeg. Rather than bend the whole design around that, the transcoder is a separate Go service that polls for jobs and writes the ladder back to object storage.
HLS rather than progressive download
A segment ladder lets the player adapt to the viewer connection, and signed playlist URLs keep the media gated without proxying bytes through the API.
Free tier as a design constraint, not an afterthought
R2 charges no egress, which is what makes video hosting viable at zero cost; the component choices follow from that.
What Is Not Done
- Not deployed; the transcoder has only run locally in Docker.
- No test suite.
- Enrollment and auth flows are specified more completely than they are implemented.