First Tube??

[pheadxdll]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

We can do some simple math to find out our storage space and bandwidth requirements:

Assume 10 Mb on average per video, with a maximum file size of 25 Mb. 10,000 x 10 Mb = 100,000 Mb = 1,000 Gb of storage space. If every single one of those videos was watched once per month, you would need 1,000 Gb of bandwidth per month.

Now 10,000 videos is quite alot at the moment. If we scale that back to say, 250 to 500 videos, now we're talking about only 2.5 Gb to 5.0 Gb of storage space needed, which sounds a lot more reasonable. If someone was to host such a site through a hosting service such as Dreamhost, then you'd have about 160 Gb of storage and 1.6 Tb of monthly bandwidth to play with, which should be enough to get such a site off the ground.

The only problem I can foresee with this is that everything uploaded to YouTube and Google Video is converted into Flash .flv video format. This process is a very processor intensive process, and some hosting companies may not like it that you have their [shared] server's CPU's all clocked out at 100% 24/7 while you transcode video. (Although if you were to host your website on a dedicated server, then they wouldn't care as much.)

(The reason all video on YouTube is converted to Flash format is because it becomes a lot more "Universal". Leaving it in QuickTime, Divx, or Windows Media format means you need that player installed. Converting it to Flash means that as long as you have Flash installed, it will work on any computer.)

At first I doubt your gonna get 10,000 videos uploaded at once. As you reach this point you can scale out the space the video takes up with an array of servers. But yeah, 10,000 videos takes up a crap load of space.

As for the load, it doesn't take but 5 seconds on a 3ghz computer to encode a 1 min of an flv file. You definately want to have the video in an flv fomat though. You can view it within the browser and its also somewhat protected from being downloaded.