I know memory is fairly cheap but e.g. there are millions of new videos on youtube everyday, each probably few hundred MBs to few GBs. It all has to take enormous amount of space. Not to mention backups.

  • @[email protected]
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    12 years ago

    It’s transposed on the fly, this is a fairly simple lambda function in AWS so whatever the GCP equivalent is. You can’t up sample potato spec, the reason it looks like shit is due to bandwidth and the service determining a lower speed than is available.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        That response is almost 10 years old and completely outdated. I’ve designed and maintained a national media service and can confirm that on the fly transcoding is both cheaper and easier. It does make sense to store different formats of videos that are popular at the minute but in the medium to long term streams are transcoded.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          Sure it’s old but the stats I posted in a lower comment show that at YouTube’s scale, it makes sense to store.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          Do you have a source? My instinct is the opposite. Compute scales with users but storage scales with videos

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            No source but I imagine the amount of videos must be outpacing the amount of users. Users come and go but every uploaded video stays forever.

          • @[email protected]
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            02 years ago

            Consider two cases:

            • the most recent MrBeast video receiving millions of views from all kinds of devices (some of which require specific formats)
            • a random video of a cat uploaded 5 years ago, total view count: 3

            Design a system that optimizes for total cost.