Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm kph D here 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute that's a lot in fact the time it took you to get to this point in the video about a fresh hour of video was uploaded somewhere on YouTube so there's plenty of content that's been watched no times and plenty of content that's been watched millions of times but here's the thing all this has to go somewhere and it's not just spit directly back to you you're not watching the originally uploaded file that's where YouTube's processing comes in so this is YouTube's processing explained so if you follow me on Twitter you already know that every time I upload a new video I tweet uploading that's just when I'm seeing this I'm uploading the file from my computer to YouTube's servers and then when the upload is done I tweet processing processing is a necessary process and for videos like this the final file size can be a couple of gigabytes and if YouTube tried to play back that original uncompressed video file for everyone that tried to watch it unless you have Google Fiber or some crazy fast internet connection it would look a lot like this a smartphone it would likely either overheat or destroy your data cap whichever came first you just can't handle that much data so YouTube has to compress the original upload into a bunch of different file formats and resolutions that anyone can watch so every single video that gets uploaded to YouTube gets processed and that processing spits out multiple versions of each video so this video for example has a 240p version a 360p version a 480p version a 720p version a 1080p version a 1440p version and a 2160p version youtube does this so it can dynamically switch you in between which version of the video you're watching so it might start you off at the 720p version and if your internet connection is really good and things seem to be moving pretty smoothly it might bump you up to the 1080p version so if you might notice a couple seconds in the video it gets a little bit clearer that's what's happening sometimes the opposite happens sometimes you move to a poorer connection strength and you might switch from 720p on your phone down to 360p basically YouTube is constantly determining every few seconds which processed version of the video to show you based on your connection strength and your playback status and all this is to avoid ever showing you that Spinney buffering bar now if you're feeling daring and your computer and your connection strength are up to it you can click to watch this video in full 2160p or full 4k if your device supports it and that's pretty high quality but even that full 4k video here on YouTube is not the same as the original file that was uploaded this process version is compressed to about a tenth of the original file size of course it hasn't always been this way you know up until March 2008 the highest quality video you could watch on YouTube was 240 P and then a couple months later we got an HQ button to move you to bump up to 360 P so it's not always been super high quality when I first started uploading YouTube the highest quality it's supported with 720p so every mkbhd video was 720p HD back in the day but of course now we have all sorts of not only resolutions but codecs to help compress video and help be able to watch super high quality video smoothly all over YouTube also just to throw out my personal theory this adaptive bitrate streaming is why youtubers can't see the analytics on who is watching the video and what resently who watches in 4k I mean we might be able to get analytics on who clicks to watch in certain resolutions but even that doesn't guarantee you stay at 4k for the entire video either way YouTube processing is very complex but also very important and constantly happening yes it does break sometimes but it's also updated sometimes with newer codecs and newer methods but bottom line next time you see your favorite youtuber tweet that their new video is processing you know exactly what that means thanks for watching base