So how do YouTube manage?

Craig321 · 22 May 2007 at 00:34

I've always wondered how YouTube manage the converting/encoding of all the videos to FLV.

The main reason I wonder is the fact that I've never had to wait in a queue to upload or have my video encoded.

I've been messing around with mencoder/FFMPEG to convert videos to FLV (which is apparently what YouTube use).

A single conversion is nothing, but I really don't see how YouTube convert thousands of videos a day with no queues? (Above a Pizza shop IIRC :rolleyes:

).

Who wants to enlighten me?

(Couldn't make up my mind on what category this should go in, so it's here

)

Craig.

Craig321 · 22 May 2007 at 00:41

EVH said:
Could be the fact that Google now own them.

Also, there's a brief delay before it becomes 'searchable' so it's probably this overhead that allows them that little extra time to get it done.

Who knows

But before Google had them you could upload videos just fine without a queue.

I know they set the thumbnails in a queue, but every time I have uploaded a video I can watch it straight away :eek:

Someone needs to tell me!!!

Craig321 · 22 May 2007 at 00:57

Vai said:
It is safe to assume that not many people upload videos, and most people just download and view them, so even though YouTube is very popular, the amount of video's needing to be converted is a relatively small percent. And the quality of the video's on YouTube is pretty bad so they will run a fast optimized encode of what you upload and a slow algorithm designed to produce high quality movies.

One of the first links I found on google says that they spend ~$1million a month on bandwidth, this was a year ago so is probably more now. If you can afford a million a month on bandwidth you can afford multiple seriously high spec servers.

That's a lot of bandwidth!

So are you guys saying that their encoding/converting is just pure power?

I also found this for anyone interested: http://www.computers.net/2006/08/youtube_stats_r.html

Craig321 · 22 May 2007 at 01:36

NokkonWud said:
Lots of computers in a farm, thought that would be obvious?

Pretty much, but I still wonder how they manage the video converting without queues... does it really just go straight into encoding when the user submits it?

Craig321 · 22 May 2007 at 15:49

dbmzk1 said:
Yes... hence why you can view it right away.

Try it on your home PC. Doesn't take that long - a few seconds in most instances - to convert a video into crappy quality flv. Now imagine a farm of high-spec servers doing it and you will start to see how they do it.

Yeah, I've been playing around with mencoder/FFMPEG (which is apparently what they use) & encoding is fairly quick.

Thinking back now I did upload a video onto YouTube the other day and it took quite a few minutes to show up.

Also, most of the YouTube videos are pretty small, so encoding them would be easy.

Now I know

Thanks,
Craig.

Craig321 · 23 May 2007 at 19:16

Energize said:
Even my pc encodes video to h.264 at 150fps, I think any computer can handle 320x240 flv encodes.

Ooh, what program do you use to measure that?

I wanna see how fast mine goes

Craig321 · 23 May 2007 at 20:08

Energize said:
Virtual dub tells you the speed your pc is encoding the videos at. No idea wether it supports multi core or not, but there is a threads option in the encoder.

Cool, thanks