this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Fascinating! I guess I should have known, because I use yt-dlp a lot and see each video has multiple formats available, but multimedia streaming is not my forte so I never put much thought into the technicalities.
Pardon the ignorant follow-up question: it doesn't encode on-the-fly, right? It encodes upon uploading the source, then it keeps a copy of each format?
As I understand it, it ingests an uploaded video and automatically encodes it in a bunch of different quality settings in h.264, then, if the video is popular enough to justify the computational cost of encoding into AV1 and VP9, they'll do that when the video reaches something like 1000 views. And yes, once encoded they just keep the copies so that it doesn't have to be done again.
Here's a 2-year-old blog post where YouTube describes some of the technical challenges.
As that blog post explains, when you're running a service that ingests 500 hours of user submitted video every minute, you'll need to handle that task differently than how, for example, Netflix does (with way more video minutes being served, but a comparatively tiny amount of original video content to encode, where bandwidth efficiency becomes far more important than encoding computational efficiency).
Thanks a lot for the explanation and the link.
I asked about that because I thought if it's a one-time thing, then the uploader would be the one using their own computer to encode. Maybe they're given a desktop software or a set configurations for, say, ffmpeg. It would certainly be less attractive than to just upload it and let the platform handle it.
Yeah, I think it's doable to distribute that compute burden if each channel owner has a desktop CPU laying around to encode a bunch of video formats, but lots of people are doing stuff directly on their phones, and I don't think a phone CPU/GPU would be able to process a significant amount of video without heat/power issues.