The spinner is that little that little circle that little wheel of dots that sort of spins around in the video window
[when] all of a sudden we've run out of video to play we have not sent the video to your computer fast enough the buffering
Circle is my nemesis it may be one of the most
unwelcome
animations on the Internet
The biggest problem that we're trying to attack today is how do we get rid of the spinner?
how do we make it so that as you're watching a video it never stops until you get to the end and
It's it's a big challenge. [it's] it has a lot of different dimensions, and there's so many things that can go wrong and
Some of them are under our control and some of them are not under our control the buffering strategy to youtube videos
Is different depending on where you watch them in some cases the video you'll start to download it and off it goes
In other cases you download it in pieces like [it] sliced bread in general
We prefer to download in pieces because it lets you adapt it means that you can
Decide that things are great and give people a high quality video or you can decide that things aren't going to not going so well
And you could downgrade and try to make the playback smoother the spinner looks the way
It does it's there just to at least to give you some notion that we're still trying
but we don't spend a [lot] of time figuring out how to
Make it look nicer. We spend more time figuring out how to make it go away
Spinner itself is actually it's a [Jif]
It's a chip sitting there
Yeah, it's just is [just] sitting there going round and round and round well it depends YouTube videos play in so many places
There are many different versions there are
jpegs [there] are csS
animations there are
Flash animations when someone uploads a video to us we then take that video and we create a whole
bunch of different files out of it and those files represent
different levels of quality different levels of
Bandwidth and you can see this if you use the youtube player you have that little selector which says you know 720p 480p
360p 240p those are all the different files. There are some one that's for example if
You shot a video on your phone, and it's very very small. There's not much gained by making one. That's very very large
So there are some constraints in that way in addition to those files those files themselves are
Chopped up into small pieces so for each of those files
We [have] these pieces that [represent] a couple seconds of video the actual size
can [vary] and that's something we play around with
From time to time to [see] if it has any impact on the reliability of the streaming one of the challenges that we have to
Deal with is getting to all these different devices that [support] different formats, and so we actually we have them
We have these as [Mp4] [s] you know using the h.264 codec
We have these as webm files with the VP8 and VP9
Codecs we also have these as 3GP files with some other MpEG-4 codecs to reach older phones
So not only have you got all of these videos being uploaded every day
You're then turning them into all these different resolutions, and all these different file formats
We have a pretty large set of formats and resolutions that we support at the end of the day
So when I upload this video how many different formats will it be existing in?
that's a really good [question] and
Personally I've almost lost count
It's it's certainly a couple dozen google has a lot of different data centers [around] the world and we also have
You know a network of caches [that] sort of deployed with you various isPs around the world
So as you as you're sort of dividing up as you're uploading this video creating all these different formats
Chopping those formats up into pieces then you're putting each of those videos in whatever data center that
may happen to have space
we're making a couple of replicas to make sure we don't lose it and
Then over time as [people] watch the video
It will get sort of it will get further
Distributed to different places so that it's close to where the people are watching it. It's pretty amazing isn't it it's pretty fun
It's a pretty big system. It's one of the cool things [about] working here is it's
That there aren't many systems like it in the world
So there's any host of things that can go wrong when we're trying when we're trying to play a video
you know it could be that you're using your computer and
Your computer is doing a lot of different things at the same [time] it could be that you're on a wi-Fi [Network]
That is kind of like a little bit weak like especially imagine. You're at a hotel and [you] know hotel
Wi-Fi is let's the undertow bad it could just be that
There's a lot of activity going on in your iSp and in your neighborhood
It could be that no one in your
Area has ever watched this video before so we don't have a copy close by and we [have] to go to a [faraway] server to
Get it the key message. Here is just that there's an inordinately
But some of which we can't control directly and so the best we can do and the thing we feel very compelled to do is
Work around these problems to the best. We can and [make] them invisible to you
this is why we chopped the video up into small pieces [the] thing that you connect with
Gathers those pieces and puts them in order so [they] can play back in sequence as you're watching the video
It's you know. It's getting the next piece and the next piece and it's looking a couple pieces ahead
Well, they don't have to be in order
YouTube videos it can be broken into pieces
And then delivered out of order or also you could break them up so that the audio is in one piece and that the video
Is in another and so then when [you]?
When you watch them the thing that you're watching puts them back together as it gets to each piece its
Observing, how fast it was able [to] retrieve that piece
It's like I got this hd piece, and it downloaded really quickly so I can keep getting hD
Or it might say the hD pieces are starting to come in slowly
And I'm not going to be able to maintain that if I keep asking for HD
eventually [I]
[know] the user is going to watch the video faster than I can get the video and you're going to have that spinner and
So then I would say for the next piece. I'm going to go get the 480p piece or the 360p piece instead
To make sure that the video keeps going on uninterrupted and of course. We do the reverse as well
It could be that you're watching the video at 360 p
But we noticed that it's really fast and we say
Okay, you have a really fast connection next time I'm going to upgrade you to hD behind the scenes magic
You don't have to do anything, and we give you a better quality when you see the buffer spinner
We retry [we'll] try to get another video that
We think might play more smoothly youtube should just work, and you're welcome to make choices as they're presented
But you shouldn't have to
It's really up to us to try to make the video play as as best it can and what we would like to do is
Give you not just one that's adequate one. That's beautiful
That's that's hd that has great sound and that's our goal, and we should bring that to you
You shouldn't have to ask
This is our responsibility to make better, and we're not done until no one ever sees that spinner and people still see that spinner
Yeah, we we collect the data we monitor the forums
We know it's still happening, and we're constantly tuning and investigating and trying to figure out okay if people are still seeing the spinner
Why does it have something to do with?
The type of Network they have does it have something to do with the country
They're in does it have something to do with the video
They're watching the relationship from people's device to the internet is probably [the] one that's fraught with the most variation
one of the big challenges is the fact that we're trying to support a
huge range of different types of environments
You know everything from someone watching a video on their phone in India to watching a video on a new 4K?
TV with gigot with a gigabit connection in the [u.s.], do I feel that people blame me for
YouTube's Performance issues I
Think they do
Blame me for you, too performance issues, but I think that they're correct. [I] don't think there's any approach out there
That's been suggested or any
Technique that's been out that out there. That is probably not part of our
bundle of tricks the Burden of proof on
YouTube is to work and
If you're not getting if the video doesn't play as you wish then you should ask why?
We make sense for us to walk [in] and say guys you know
I'm feeling like we ought to put a higher weight on something even if I were to
Feel that we ought to put a higher way than one watch 26 27 zeros
And then a few ones for every single character that is incredibly wasteful