YouTube engineers say that any kind of video that comes from any random camera in the world has shown up in their system. The question is upon receiving loads of such videos each minute, all of them varying in resolution, size, etc. What does YouTube do to them so that everyone across the globe can experience a optimized flawless video playback?. I have done some research from videos of "Nat and Lo 20% project" and here is the brief report of the same.
What does YouTube do to your video after you upload it?
YouTube produces all possible video resolution version of your uploaded video and finally results in something that anyone can watch it in any possible screen and bandwidth. Because if YouTube plays the video in the same format you uploaded, it would cause constant buffering in low bandwidth networks. To avoid this from happening, YouTube does something called as 'processing' after you upload a video.
What does YouTube do to your video after you upload it?
YouTube produces all possible video resolution version of your uploaded video and finally results in something that anyone can watch it in any possible screen and bandwidth. Because if YouTube plays the video in the same format you uploaded, it would cause constant buffering in low bandwidth networks. To avoid this from happening, YouTube does something called as 'processing' after you upload a video.
After you upload a video, youtube examines the resolution, frame rate of the video and decide on how it can be cut into small slices (read the previous post to understand the concept of slices). After examining, a high resolution video of your upload will be created, YouTube calls it 'Mezzanine'. This Mezzanine is then cut into smaller pieces of videos, say each of 5 seconds. Then each piece is passed to a different machine where some algorithms are performed which results in different resolution videos(1080p,4k,720p,480p,360p etc) of your upload. Then all these smaller pieces are assembled together and a final piece is produced. Around 25 different resolution videos are produced for an uploaded video.
What's the benefit of this mechanism?
If you upload a 4k video, and someone with 4k Television tries to access your video, original video will be played for him. someone with a 1080p device will be provided with a bit of lower resolution video. Which will result in an efficient and flawless playback.
How does YouTube make all these smaller resolution video?
This is where CODECs come into picture. CODEC stands for 'Compression and Decompression'. A video is considered as a bunch of dots (pixels). when you do so, some dots in the frame looks similar.
What's the benefit of this mechanism?
If you upload a 4k video, and someone with 4k Television tries to access your video, original video will be played for him. someone with a 1080p device will be provided with a bit of lower resolution video. Which will result in an efficient and flawless playback.
How does YouTube make all these smaller resolution video?
This is where CODECs come into picture. CODEC stands for 'Compression and Decompression'. A video is considered as a bunch of dots (pixels). when you do so, some dots in the frame looks similar.
To put it in other way, Consider a video where a person is talking and there is a wall behind him. In the video, wall is constantly at the same place. Only the person is moving. So the pixels of the wall need not be refreshed each second. So that part of the video where the wall is present is regenerated accordingly without using new pixels. This shrinks the video size. If you have observed, videos with constant screen changes has larger sizes compared to a single screened video :P
What else YouTube does to your video?
Along with processing, it also tries to generate a suitable thumbnail to your video using some algorithms. Also for some videos, voice recognizing takes place to generate automatic subtitles for that video.
Along with processing, it also tries to generate a suitable thumbnail to your video using some algorithms. Also for some videos, voice recognizing takes place to generate automatic subtitles for that video.
All these tasks goes on running for thousands of videos simultaneously.
YouTube does many things besides simply playing videos for its clients isn't it?
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