3 ms·

It wouldn't add computational complexity, or use extra storage. Surely the audio is already stored as an mp3 or some similar format, after all wasn't mp3 invent

• blhack 15y ago
  My question comes down to how they're stored. [Obviously] I'm not an expert on video encoding or containers. FLV is a container, yes? Usually, I'm guessing, MP3 and H.264. H.264 works out well for youtube because they can then also use this on their HTML5 video players. So are the H.264 blobs and the mp3 blobs stored as discrete files, then packaged when a video is loaded and sent down the tubes? If so, then yeah, obviously, it would be really easy or youtube to serve "audio only"; probably "a few lines of code". But if the MP3 and H.264 (again h.264 is an assumption) are stored as one [flv] package, they would have to be unpacked before being able to be sent down as their individual components. Again, this is a shortcoming in my understanding of video containers, so maybe I'm missing the point on this completely. (As in: maybe "unpacking" an FLV is trivial)
• mgcross 15y ago
  Most videos uploaded in the past couple of years would be compressed as MPEG4 (h.264, specifically), but regardless of the video format the audio/video would be muxed into one file. If the video track consists of one still image, the impact (serverside compression, storage, delivery) of the video track would be minimal.