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.

  • Falmarri@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Does youtube actually store copies of each one? Or does it store 1 master copy and downsaple as required in real time. Probably stores it since storage is cheaper than cpu time

      • patsharpesmullet@vlemmy.net
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        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
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            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            That response is almost 10 years old and completely outdated.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
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              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.