Adaptive Streaming - System Design

If you don't know this, you suck at system design. If you've ever watched YouTube, you'll know there's different options for your video quality. So, when a creator uploads a video in say 1080p, what's going to happen is a transcoding process where YouTube will actually create all of these different resolutions on the back end. So, as system designers, we need to understand adaptive streaming, which will allow us to automatically change which resolution is best. To do this, we need to know two words. The first one is resolution, which essentially means your canvas size. Now, we all know that 1080p is say HD, 1920 by 1080p pixels. Per frame, that's going to cost you about 2 million pixels. Now, it gets interesting when you incorporate bit rate, which is typically limited by your internet speed. So, let's say you were trying to watch a 1080p video at 30 frames a second. You would actually need to process 62 million pixels every second. In order to support that, you would need a bit rate of about 7 megabits per second. So, then the key to adaptive streaming is to vary your resolution depending on your bit rate. That's going to go up and down depending on your internet quality. You basically just download different qualities depending on the bit rate that you can support. I teach this stuff every day and growing really fast, so follow along to learn