How to design a streaming service like YouTube?

Amazon / Eng
有冇搞错

Go to company page Amazon Eng

有冇搞错
Nov 13, 2021 7 Comments

Apparently I’m preparing for SD interview. I came across this question and wonder how videos are stored on distributed file system. Is a file broken into chunks and stored? If so, can a media player play chunk by chunk in serial without combining the chunks?

TC 200
Yoe 5

#faang #interview

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TOP 7 Comments
  • New
    CQxN46

    New

    CQxN46
    I’m just a product manager but you should understand codecs, transcoding, streaming tech like HLS or DASH, think about CDNs, subtitles, storage, media regions, control plane regions, and more
    Nov 13, 2021 1
  • Arcesium / Eng
    ThreadPool

    Go to company page Arcesium Eng

    ThreadPool
    Yes, it is stored in chunks. Whenever, you play a video, youtube continues to download these chunks sequentially in the background while the video is playing. The chunks are kinda independent of each other. There are no issues as long as the media player has unconsumed data. If you skip forward, then the appropriate chunk is downloaded and all the previous chunks are skipped.
    There are a lot of sources available for video streaming services on the net.
    Nov 13, 2021 0
  • Financial Service Company
    MkKs37

    Financial Service Company

    MkKs37
    The key insight interviewers love is that netflix is actually 1000x easier to run than youtube.

    They simply need to push their hyper curated library to each regional CDN which solves 99% of problems.

    YouTube is uniquely difficult in that it has no curated content. Anyone can watch anything at any time uploaded from anyone? CDNs need to dynically populate instead.

    A fun point ot make is that I'd you can alter the recommendation system to favor locally cahced content, you can make massive gains in total system load
    Nov 13, 2021 1
  • Procore
    TwIE80

    Go to company page Procore

    TwIE80
    I think the concept is adaptive bit rate streaming?
    Nov 13, 2021 1