How sites like Youtube works?

How is their infrastructure, their Flash video conversion

[mirceagoia]

Hi,
I'm interested how sites like Youtube have the infrastructure and how they work in term of taking a video from an user (the user uploads) and converting to Flash (FLV) in realtime (when the user uploads the conversion to FLV is done on the fly)?

What it takes to built a site like that (not of Youtube size but a smaller one - like having hundreds and hundreds of videos, maybe thousands, and having hundreds or maybe thousands of visitors seeing videos in the same time)? Especially the infrastructure and the real time conversion modality (from almost any format to Flash FLV)...

Thank you.

[MThiessen]

I would say most likely youtube creates it's own propritary software, similar to google, it creates it's own software too. (or outsourcing, with non-disclosure agreements).

BUT the big kicker with a youtube type site is bandwidth. Even on a server farm with a dedicated server, there is only so much bandwidth allowed. Even on one that claims "unlimited" bandwidth they will find a way to get rid of you if you stress out their network.

Another consideration is storage. It has to be vast to allow the comunity and the spirit of the site to thrive.

Sure you may want a youtube type site, and say to yourself "I will keep it small, so I won't have youtube's worries" BUT you *might* grow... Wouldn't it be terrible to have it become really successful and realize that you are in wayyy over your head?

Back in 97 I had a banner exchange site that was perl driven. It became real popular and I was selling lots of ads. BUT I was using perl, and perl has it's limits. I got file lock issues, corrupt data issues, improper tracking... etc etc... It got so bad, and I was too "green" that I had to abandon a thriving business and refund lots of money.

So you can inadvertantly get in way over your head, I did and it's not fun at all.

[Optin]

Perhaps someone, with brilliant programmers, could compete with YouTube by using Distributed computing Napster/Kazaa type networks. Each video uploaded would be copied to thousands of Home PC's.
The more valuable customers could get premier access to the central servers, whereas new or less valuable vistors could be redirected to the Distributed network where downloads would run slower.
The benefit would be that the bandwidth burden would be shared among the users.

[centime]

@ mirceagoia

I've looked briefly at youtube and it would appear that the tech they use is fairly standard video streaming using the users default mediaplayer, i.e. microsoft media player, apple quicktime, real player etc etc

what did you mean by conversion to flash