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How Does YouTube Work?

2015-05-06
more than 1 billion people watched YouTube but what does it take for you to be watching this video right now for most people computers in the internet just work however the journey that this video has to take to make it to you is nothing short of incredible it all starts out on this little memory card inside is a tiny computer the process is the footage that lives on the SD cards memory from here the video is transferred over to the computer where the editing begins this is where the video starts to take shape the clips are put together and things like music are added and colors tweaked once the video is done it's time for compression the tens of thousands of individual frames that make up the video are broken into pieces to shrink the files small enough to be easily washed later at this point the video is done but it still has a long way to go before you're able to watch it to make it onto the Internet your computer chops the video into even smaller pieces called packets these are transmitted wirelessly via radio waves which typically take the form of a Wi-Fi or cellular network from here the video travels to a modem which sends the data along into the massive series of data centers that make up the internet something as simple as uploading a video to YouTube can travel thousands of miles and hit many servers before it finally arrives at YouTube from here the video is unpacked and then encoded into a variety of quality settings ranging from 144p all the way up to 1080p and beyond when you click on the video this process goes in Reverse youtube chops the file back up and sends it to the internet your modem and router and then wirelessly to you in a matter of milliseconds then your device pieces the video back together and unpacks all those frames into the video that you're watching right now that's how this video traveled from my apartment to you wherever you are in the world if you enjoyed this video feel free to share it and you can make the entire journey happen one more time
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