Comment by patentatt
4 years ago
Just as an aside, it's absolutely astounding how much hardware Google must throw at YouTube to achieve this for any video anybody in the world wants to upload. The processing power to reencode to so many versions, and then to store all of those versions, and then make all of those accessible anywhere in the world at a moments notice. Really is such an incredible waste for most YouTube content.
Keep in mind that they can very well predict which videos will have any meaningful amount of views <99% and just encode on demand the ones that won’t.
I didn't know that, and am glad that they do transcode on the fly when appropriate. Very impressive that it's seamless to the end user, I've never sat waiting for a YouTube clip to play even when it's definitely something from the 'back catalog' like a decade old video with a dozen views.
I'm not sure if it's a waste, as the video needs to be reencoded somewhere.