Comments

GlennChan wrote on 4/15/2009, 9:07 PM
Yeah but... comScore data is out of touch with reality.

Other comScore data puts Yahoo's search share at 20%+... it's more 5%. This is what many people see in their web logs. And MSN / live search? Almost nobody uses it (though it does generate negligible traffic... sometimes I use it).

Credit Suisse estimates the average video uploaded is 30 to 40 Mybtes and that YouTube is storing at least 5 petabytes of video.
30-40 (megabytes presumably) seems way off... it's difficult to make a video that big on Youtube due to size/length limitations.

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I've no idea how much it actually costs to run Youtube. You probably have to figure out the cost of running Google's data center(s).
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/15/2009, 9:28 PM
i wouldn't say it hard... how many people upload huge vid's that aren't edited or compressed from the digital camera/miniDVD camera they recorded it on?
GlennChan wrote on 4/15/2009, 9:30 PM
You have to send compressed video to Youtube's servers, and then it will recompress it into their format.

The biggest size for a 10-minute Youtube video seems to be about 25MB or so... use one of those Youtube downloading programs/sites to find out.

2- Peer1 runs data centers in multiple cities. Its operating costs were $75M last year... Google's costs are likely in that ballpark.

*Of course there are variables to consider, e.g. # of servers between peer1 and Youtube, customers providing their own servers / Peer1, etc.
farss wrote on 4/15/2009, 10:58 PM
There's a bit of an insight into Google's datacentre design here.

Some news on deals between YouTube and Sony etc here.

Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/16/2009, 3:44 AM
The biggest size for a 10-minute Youtube video seems to be about 25MB or so... use one of those Youtube downloading programs/sites to find out.

I've been under the impression youtube keeps the original video you uploaded. Infact, it must if when it changed from 4:3 to 16:9 it re-encoded some videos automatically. Does seem kind of silly for them to hold on to all old videos just for upgrading the quality down the road.
RalphM wrote on 4/16/2009, 5:31 AM
"use one of those Youtube downloading programs/sites to find out."

Any examples of these sites, Glenn?

Thanks,
Ralph
GlennChan wrote on 4/16/2009, 2:31 PM
This might work:
http://youtubedownload.altervista.org/

(or check google)
TGS wrote on 4/16/2009, 4:42 PM
Is it possible that they actually use the original and use real-time rendering to give you the 3 levels of videos?
Although mine are not Hi-Def, I upload at a high enough bit-rate that I get regular quality, high quality, and HD to choose from. It would seem crazy to store 3 different levels of quality plus the original. Plus regular quality is in mono, High quality and HD will give you stereo and possibly 5.1, although I haven't checked anything for 5.1 yet. That's quite a few things to store, keep track of and manage.
AtomicGreymon wrote on 4/17/2009, 7:40 PM
I think they store the various different quality levels as different files, in addition to keeping the original. There's a trick that you can use to download the 720p HD files, and they're surprisingly small... apparently YouTube only uses a bitrate around 2000kbps.

The quality of their HD video is impressive, though, given the relatively low bitrate they use. I"ve uploaded a couple videos at 1280x720 since YouTube enabled the HD feature, and they turned out great. You can also get to the regular HQ versions of them, but you need to manually enter "&fmt=18" at the end of the URL, as there's only a button to switch between regular quality and HD.
TGS wrote on 4/17/2009, 8:20 PM
I should have made it clear, that I do upload 1280x720, even though it's SD. I just use all the real estate by filling in the dead space with more SD.
AtomicGreymon wrote on 4/17/2009, 10:02 PM
I should have made it clear, that I do upload 1280x720, even though it's SD. I just use all the real estate by filling in the dead space with more SD.

I imagine doing that is still better than uploading the same SD video at 640x360, or 854x480. I've only really seen one pseudo-HD video like that on YouTube, but it still looked far better in full-screen mode than the HQ option.

The vids I've uploaded to YT in HD so far have been 1280x720, H.264, VBR, with an average bitrate of around 8000kbps (max of 16000kbps). They've turned out pretty well.