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.

    • patsharpesmullet@vlemmy.net
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      1 year 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.

        • patsharpesmullet@vlemmy.net
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year 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          That response is almost 10 years old and completely outdated.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.

          • mangomission@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year 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.

          • mangomission@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

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

            • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year 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.

              • mangomission@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                I think you might be underestimating how many users YouTube has! According to this, 720,000 hours per day are uploaded versus 1,000,000,000 hours are watched per day!

                • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  No assumptions about specific usage. Just that at a certain point or in certain scenarios (that I’m sure YouTube’s engineers fully understand), there’s a point where one becomes more cost effective than the other.

                  Those are pretty incredible numbers though, wow. The scale of that usage is insane.

            • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year 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.