Recently I’m courious about how exactly Youtube.com works. Youtube is like a video version of “Flickr”, their tag line is ‘Broadcast yourself’. You can upload and share your video for free.
The interesting part is youtube uses Flash video (FLV) to delivery a video in their service, the reason maybe to reduce file size and also allows most platforms and browsers to easily view the content. You can upload almost any video file (mov, mpeg, wmv, asf, avi ) to their server, and they automatically convert it into FLV, yeah… I did a little research on this one 
and surfing around and found that they use Server Side Encoding Software called On2 Flix Engine SDK.
Well of course I have to try their services, so I created an account and upload a video. I want to see how the server side enconding works ;), so I created a ‘big’ video file (60Mb mpeg version) and upload to their server, well it took a while to upload, but since i used aDSL, so it’s no problem for me…
After wait for while, a message pop on the screen and says :
Your upload was successfully added! Your video is currently being processed and will be available to view in a few minutes. You can add or edit your video information and share with friends.
So here’s my first youtube video look like
It’s my band’s performance in newscafe in 2005. The song is called : The Spirit Carries on (Dream Theater) , the file size in FLV is now only ‘15Mb’, so if you have a limited connection, please be patient .
Well.. since this subject is very interesting for me, I’m thinking to use it with my Master Project, and I just found out that there’s and open source for this server side encoding, FFMPEG .