So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon. Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin. Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.

    • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Hosting and bandwidth for videos has a big cost.

      Plus it’s computationally expensive. YouTube has entire data centers filled with servers using custom silicon to encode ingested videos into nearly every resolution/framerate and codec they serve, so that different clients get the most efficient option for their quality settings and supported codecs, no matter what the original uploader happened to upload. Granted, that workflow mainly makes sense because of bandwidth costs, but the high quality of the user experience depends on that backend.

        • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.orgEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          As I understand it, it ingests an uploaded video and automatically encodes it in a bunch of different quality settings in h.264, then, if the video is popular enough to justify the computational cost of encoding into AV1 and VP9, they’ll do that when the video reaches something like 1000 views. And yes, once encoded they just keep the copies so that it doesn’t have to be done again.

          Here’s a 2-year-old blog post where YouTube describes some of the technical challenges.

          As that blog post explains, when you’re running a service that ingests 500 hours of user submitted video every minute, you’ll need to handle that task differently than how, for example, Netflix does (with way more video minutes being served, but a comparatively tiny amount of original video content to encode, where bandwidth efficiency becomes far more important than encoding computational efficiency).

            • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.orgEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Yeah, I think it’s doable to distribute that compute burden if each channel owner has a desktop CPU laying around to encode a bunch of video formats, but lots of people are doing stuff directly on their phones, and I don’t think a phone CPU/GPU would be able to process a significant amount of video without heat/power issues.

    • Sparking@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The other thing to keep in mind is that youtube (and twitch, and shudders quora), with all its problems, does share revenue with creators on the platform, instead of treating them as free labor.

      I would love to see it, but I dont think we are there yet. No impetus to switch combined with much more expensive tech. I would also antipate dmca to turn the whole thing into a mess. But one day we’ll get there hopefully.