I am wondering about how much bandwidth I would need if I wanted to make a FIRST-Tube or something since YouTube is banned at most schools. I am also wondering how much space I would need for about 10,000 1-5 minute videos with more FIRST friendly browsing like AVI, ADI, Safety Video, Teasers, Videos, Team Events etc.
The biggest thing would be that in the agreement when you register you must acknowledge that you understand that every video uploaded MUST be related to FIRST, FIRST Robotics, or the team of the person uploading the file. This is the “KEY” to getting it allowed at schools.
What do you guys think about the idea?
EDIT 1: Due to the question of funding I will add this little segment of a later post.
The way I am seeing it now is that we can propose this to Google, if they are still our sponsor seeing as they have been so supportive of FIRST and they own YouTube. Of course this would not be hard and fast and would take some time, but it would overall be great for the FIRST community.
Even if we can not get Google to sponsor it I bet that we could raise money to start it because $1-2 from every person interested and that can spare it would be enough to get it going at least for the rest of this current season and it is a great opportunity to get corporate sponsors who want to advertise to robotic consumers the next season kind of like CD has the sponsors at the top and how many people have Google ADs on their websites.
I am totaly with you on this. I was talking to some friends the other day about how bad you tube is for finding videos. If i had the money i would build a first tube site in a min.
The way I am seeing it now is that we can propose this to Google, if they are still our sponsor seeing as they have been so supportive of FIRST and they own YouTube. Of course this would not be hard and fast and would take some time, but it would overall be great for the FIRST community.
Even if we can not get Google to sponsor it I bet that we could raise money to start it because $1-2 from every person interested and that can spare it would be enough to get it going at least for the rest of this current season and it is a great opportunity to get corporate sponsors who want to advertise to robotic consumers the next season kind of like CD has the sponsors at the top and how many people have Google ADs on their websites.
Not a bad idea, I think I’d like to help. I’ve made a flash video delivery system out of php before with a simple video uploader. The server converted the video to an flv with ffmpeg and bam, its online. If you seriously want to consider doing this idea I’d volenteer the use of my own server and some of my code. My server has 2.5 terabytes of bandwith and 300 GB of space. Enough to get it started. If your more interested email me or PM me.
Also the name “First Tube” might be copyrighting youtube.
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.
I’m gonna go against the grain and not support FLV format because the lack of support of the Flash player on Linux. I’d also say that as a FIRST family, we should support sharing videos.
Flash is completely supported on linux. They even came out with version 9 recently for linux. You could also convert the videos to wmv or avi and have them downloadable.
You tube is not the best to find a single video on however there are some FRC groups on there that link to a large number of videos I put a group up for colorado teams and found 2 national groups located at http://youtube.com/group/USFIRSTRobotics
We (SOAP) have been toying with this idea for a couple of weeks and we think we will be able to support the storage and bandwidth requirements of such a monstrosity. As artdutra mentioned, the conversion process is very demanding and would easily run up the bill, which is what has stopped us thus far.
