5 ms·

Reimagining video infrastructure to empower YouTube

70 points by prostoalex 5y ago

axiosgunnar 5y ago
> Reimagining video infrastructure to empower YouTube What level of corporate buzzword bingo is this on?
- 1_player 5y ago
  "Empower" is one of those stupidly meaningless words corporate drones like to use in their slides to impress upper management. What happened to you, Google? You used to be cool.
- wmf 5y ago
  Webscale level.
  - singhkays 5y ago
    So they ended up adopting MongoDB? :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
- pimlottc 5y ago
  I get that this a engineering article but wow, what a tone deaf title. Nobody outside of Google wants to “empower” YouTube, they have plenty of power already. If anyone needs empowering, it’s the users (aka actual people).
  - jchw 5y ago
    The good faith interpretation would probably be “YouTube [Creators]” which seems to be what was meant.
    - ForHackernews 5y ago
      They've already made their own demonym, so why not write "to empower YouTubers" if that's what they meant?
      - jchw 5y ago
        I don’t know. But based on reading the article, it sure seems like it is talking about YouTubers.
- ffhhj 5y ago
  Quantum supremacy level.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Fits perfectly imo. Did you read that article?
handrous 5y ago
TL;DR they started using dedicated and purposed-designed video encoding/transcoding chips.
- sheikheddy 5y ago
  Any implications for end-users, or notable improvements from an engineering standpoint?
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    > Any implications for end-users For end users competing against them yes, they and the other "We run the internet's biggest sites and are also a cloud provider" providers are leveraging dominance in one area to fund and build technology that you simply can't compete with. From their point of view an entirely rational thing to do (and hardly new) but it does create an un-level playing field when you use money from one area to enter and dominate a market in another. For anyone familiar this has all the hallmarks of the standard oil days when an oil company took over large swathes of the transport industry and charged differential rates based on local competition, selling at a loss where their was competition.
xnx 5y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034627
xmprt 5y ago
Anecdotally, whatever YouTube has done in recently years has completely ruined a lot of 480p and 360p videos. I uploaded a native 360p video about 10 years ago and in the end card, I added small red text that was visible. And when I uploaded it at the time, it was visible on YouTube as well. Now that section just looks like a bunch of red blurry lines. If you ever wondered why old videos look so bad, it's not just because you're used to 1080p and so 360p looks terrible in comparison. YouTube is actively reducing old video quality through whatever reencoding they're doing.
- mdonahoe 5y ago
  They probably lowered the max bitrate for 360p videos.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Which might make sense for variable bitrate content, but makes no sense for videos that were only ever 360p in the first place! Youtube basically made a lot of old videos unwatchable.
  - denimnerd42 5y ago
    Which would destroy any 360p video so they should have known better than that. Transcoding is pretty bad stuff.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  If your original content wasn't one of YouTube's current formats it was likely reencoded. If the original was MPEG-4 part 2 or Sorensen Spark that a decade ago YouTube might just passed through, today it would be reencoded before delivery. Their pipeline taking 1080p or 4K content to a 360p stream will produce decent quality. The encoding configuration for today's use also might be very different from the original. If their 360p profile used today ups the GOP length and drops the video bitrate the video content can definitely end up bit starved. Readable text in a 360p video would be difficult to keep readable reencoding without manual tweaking of the encoder settings. I also wonder if old content with low viewership is just encoded on the fly with a hardware encoder and thrown into a big YouTube-wide LRU cache. Hardware encoders can have some really coarse grained settings and make low resolution/low bitrate content look pretty horrible.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
bad re-invite, this is what this one is about/being discussed already: Google Replaces Millions of Intel's CPUs with Its Own Homegrown Chips https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390398
ExtraE 5y ago
When did google buy the .youtube TLD? Anyone know how to view a list of corporate TLDs? (Yes I know they’re mostly owned by ICAN anymore and all therefore corporate in some sense).
- HWR_14 5y ago
  .youtube isn't shocking. Google also owns .dev A lot of people used to use .dev as a reserved, localhost style dns lookup.
  - totony 5y ago
    Fun fact, .dev forces https on modern browsers. Caused a bit of trouble when a colleague of mine tried setting up a new local test server.
- wmf 5y ago
  Wow, there are 1502 TLDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
dr_hooo 5y ago
Wow, this entire interview basically contained no information what so ever, except YouTube is awesome.
yellow_lead 5y ago
>Jeff: When I interview candidates for jobs here, I always mention how more than 500 hours of video content on average is uploaded every minute to the platform - that always resonates with them. Jeff seems like pretentious upper management. Not sure about others, but when I interview at companies and they brag about their scale, it's really off-putting.
- Mehdi2277 5y ago
  I personally like scale as I work in ml and that helps in making datasets large. You can do a lot of ml on small datasets but life is much easier when you get to work with what feels like infinite data. It was nice having models train on trillionish data points at a prior company. The opposite end I worked at a startup that had a couple thousand data points and dataset size was quite annoying especially in not having enough variety.
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    That's fair but it always comes off as bragging. Typically the candidate will realize something like YouTube is a big scale site before even applying.
- nojito 5y ago
  Scale problems are very fun to attack and solve.

70 points by prostoalex 5y ago

axiosgunnar 5y ago

> Reimagining video infrastructure to empower YouTube What level of corporate buzzword bingo is this on?

1_player 5y ago
"Empower" is one of those stupidly meaningless words corporate drones like to use in their slides to impress upper management. What happened to you, Google? You used to be cool.
wmf 5y ago
Webscale level.
- singhkays 5y ago
  So they ended up adopting MongoDB? :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
pimlottc 5y ago
I get that this a engineering article but wow, what a tone deaf title. Nobody outside of Google wants to “empower” YouTube, they have plenty of power already. If anyone needs empowering, it’s the users (aka actual people).
- jchw 5y ago
  The good faith interpretation would probably be “YouTube [Creators]” which seems to be what was meant.
  - ForHackernews 5y ago
    They've already made their own demonym, so why not write "to empower YouTubers" if that's what they meant?
    - jchw 5y ago
      I don’t know. But based on reading the article, it sure seems like it is talking about YouTubers.
ffhhj 5y ago
Quantum supremacy level.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Fits perfectly imo. Did you read that article?

handrous 5y ago

TL;DR they started using dedicated and purposed-designed video encoding/transcoding chips.

sheikheddy 5y ago
Any implications for end-users, or notable improvements from an engineering standpoint?
- noir_lord 5y ago
  > Any implications for end-users For end users competing against them yes, they and the other "We run the internet's biggest sites and are also a cloud provider" providers are leveraging dominance in one area to fund and build technology that you simply can't compete with. From their point of view an entirely rational thing to do (and hardly new) but it does create an un-level playing field when you use money from one area to enter and dominate a market in another. For anyone familiar this has all the hallmarks of the standard oil days when an oil company took over large swathes of the transport industry and charged differential rates based on local competition, selling at a loss where their was competition.

xnx 5y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034627

xmprt 5y ago

Anecdotally, whatever YouTube has done in recently years has completely ruined a lot of 480p and 360p videos. I uploaded a native 360p video about 10 years ago and in the end card, I added small red text that was visible. And when I uploaded it at the time, it was visible on YouTube as well. Now that section just looks like a bunch of red blurry lines. If you ever wondered why old videos look so bad, it's not just because you're used to 1080p and so 360p looks terrible in comparison. YouTube is actively reducing old video quality through whatever reencoding they're doing.

mdonahoe 5y ago
They probably lowered the max bitrate for 360p videos.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Which might make sense for variable bitrate content, but makes no sense for videos that were only ever 360p in the first place! Youtube basically made a lot of old videos unwatchable.
- denimnerd42 5y ago
  Which would destroy any 360p video so they should have known better than that. Transcoding is pretty bad stuff.
giantrobot 5y ago
If your original content wasn't one of YouTube's current formats it was likely reencoded. If the original was MPEG-4 part 2 or Sorensen Spark that a decade ago YouTube might just passed through, today it would be reencoded before delivery. Their pipeline taking 1080p or 4K content to a 360p stream will produce decent quality. The encoding configuration for today's use also might be very different from the original. If their 360p profile used today ups the GOP length and drops the video bitrate the video content can definitely end up bit starved. Readable text in a 360p video would be difficult to keep readable reencoding without manual tweaking of the encoder settings. I also wonder if old content with low viewership is just encoded on the fly with a hardware encoder and thrown into a big YouTube-wide LRU cache. Hardware encoders can have some really coarse grained settings and make low resolution/low bitrate content look pretty horrible.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

bad re-invite, this is what this one is about/being discussed already: Google Replaces Millions of Intel's CPUs with Its Own Homegrown Chips https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390398

ExtraE 5y ago

When did google buy the .youtube TLD? Anyone know how to view a list of corporate TLDs? (Yes I know they’re mostly owned by ICAN anymore and all therefore corporate in some sense).

HWR_14 5y ago
.youtube isn't shocking. Google also owns .dev A lot of people used to use .dev as a reserved, localhost style dns lookup.
- totony 5y ago
  Fun fact, .dev forces https on modern browsers. Caused a bit of trouble when a colleague of mine tried setting up a new local test server.
wmf 5y ago
Wow, there are 1502 TLDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

dr_hooo 5y ago

Wow, this entire interview basically contained no information what so ever, except YouTube is awesome.

yellow_lead 5y ago

>Jeff: When I interview candidates for jobs here, I always mention how more than 500 hours of video content on average is uploaded every minute to the platform - that always resonates with them. Jeff seems like pretentious upper management. Not sure about others, but when I interview at companies and they brag about their scale, it's really off-putting.

Mehdi2277 5y ago
I personally like scale as I work in ml and that helps in making datasets large. You can do a lot of ml on small datasets but life is much easier when you get to work with what feels like infinite data. It was nice having models train on trillionish data points at a prior company. The opposite end I worked at a startup that had a couple thousand data points and dataset size was quite annoying especially in not having enough variety.
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  That's fair but it always comes off as bragging. Typically the candidate will realize something like YouTube is a big scale site before even applying.
nojito 5y ago
Scale problems are very fun to attack and solve.