Revisiting Fireshare, self-hosting game clips sharing!

When Fireshare began as a project, it was a very reliable software back at the beginning of 2025! Even if not polished, it served its main purpose very well.

But, unfortunately, I didn't know what was the best way to use it. I was not gaming much either at the time :P

Sharing your gaming clips

Fireshare is a software designed to upload your gaming clips (or let your friends upload their own!) and share them on any platform, like Discord!. It serves the media files as-is so ideally we should optimize the files ourselves...

They have a demo of the software here

Luckily, they recently brought in integrated transcoding with ffmpeg bundled with the docker container so you don't even need to fix the optimization problem yourself! The integrated transcoding will operate on your clips, generating lower-bandwidth versions of them automatically by using your server's CPU (or GPU, if configured)

Optimize your clips, please!

Gaming clips are essentially short videos (often under 1 minute, like TikToks). They don't need the highest quality.

I'm sure more than one of you have a good monitor, but if you are sharing with friends, ask yourself:

• Do they have >=1440p monitors?
• Do you have good upload bandwidth (>20mbps) to serve them uncompressed video?
• Do they have a stable, wired connection instead of spotty mobile data?

If you answered no to any of these points, please consider compressing your clips.

The difference between serving an unoptimized 1GB 1-minute clip vs a 10MB 1-minute clip is HUGE (A 990MB difference!).

You are not forced to compress them down from 4k to 1080p. We are looking at reducing the bitrate while preserving high quality, this is completely possible with codecs like AV1, used mainly by tiny streaming startups like Netflix and Youtube.

If you want maximum compatibility with every single device in the world no matter how old, choose the H.264 codec, which is a bit older and less efficient. AV1, released in 2018, is a younger but better codec, still not supported in everyone's devices. The whole topic of media codecs is out of scope for this blog post.

What's next?

I'm working on a Tdarr (software for distributed video manipulation) workflow to optimize all the gaming clips uploaded to my server automatically, but I'm saving that deep dive for a future post, stay tuned!

Editors note, 24 December: Actually, Fireshare doesn't support their files being modified by external software like Tdarr. That's why they implement ffmpeg transcoding by themselves bundled with the Fireshare docker container.