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It probably costs them a ton of money, but they probably make a ton more so that’s OK. Also: bandwidth gets a lot cheaper when you own the pipes. And one that

by jl6 2y ago

It probably costs them a ton of money, but they probably make a ton more so that’s OK. Also: bandwidth gets a lot cheaper when you own the pipes. And one that is less obvious: despite having hundreds of millions of videos available, a large contingent of people are watching the same ultra-popular ones. There are some economies of scale to be had there.

tombert 2y ago
The thing that fascinates me isn't the bandwidth part, it's the fact that every video needs to be (to some extent) transcoded. If nothing else, most videos get encoded at several different bitrates and resolutions. While I highly doubt Youtube is just plopping the videos into a queue and firing up `ffmpeg -i myvid.mp4 -c:v libx264 -y outvid.mp4` and presumably they some dedicated silicon (or at least FPGAs) handling it, but even still it's incredible how they can pull that off. Video conversion is fairly expensive!
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Transcoding isn't that expensive. Especially when you're already running ginormous data centers and can transcode on processors that are otherwise idle. Also, video quality on YT is not great. When you're using ffmpeg to transcode a movie at home, you're probably doing it with fairly high quality settings because it's a movie. But you can also configure ffmpeg to transcode very quickly if low quality output is fine.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Even still, doesn’t YouTube get 300+ hours of video uploaded ever minute? Even if you do the ffmpeg veryfast setting I would think it would still take a lot of resources.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Well sure, but they have a lot of computers... the point is that it's not disproportionately resource-intensive compared to storage and streaming.
      - tombert 2y ago
        Fair, and dedicated ASIC chips are almost certainly used; hell if nothing else I use VAAPI with a regular AMD graphics card on a mini-gaming-pc and get better-than-software performance, and I'm sure a multi-billion dollar corporation can get better hardware than me.

by jl6 2y ago

tombert 2y ago

The thing that fascinates me isn't the bandwidth part, it's the fact that every video needs to be (to some extent) transcoded. If nothing else, most videos get encoded at several different bitrates and resolutions. While I highly doubt Youtube is just plopping the videos into a queue and firing up `ffmpeg -i myvid.mp4 -c:v libx264 -y outvid.mp4` and presumably they some dedicated silicon (or at least FPGAs) handling it, but even still it's incredible how they can pull that off. Video conversion is fairly expensive!

crazygringo 2y ago
Transcoding isn't that expensive. Especially when you're already running ginormous data centers and can transcode on processors that are otherwise idle. Also, video quality on YT is not great. When you're using ffmpeg to transcode a movie at home, you're probably doing it with fairly high quality settings because it's a movie. But you can also configure ffmpeg to transcode very quickly if low quality output is fine.
- tombert 2y ago
  Even still, doesn’t YouTube get 300+ hours of video uploaded ever minute? Even if you do the ffmpeg veryfast setting I would think it would still take a lot of resources.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Well sure, but they have a lot of computers... the point is that it's not disproportionately resource-intensive compared to storage and streaming.
    - tombert 2y ago
      Fair, and dedicated ASIC chips are almost certainly used; hell if nothing else I use VAAPI with a regular AMD graphics card on a mini-gaming-pc and get better-than-software performance, and I'm sure a multi-billion dollar corporation can get better hardware than me.