Ask HN: Building YouTube Alternative If you would be tasked with creating youtube alternative(not at that scale, of course), how would you approach it from technical point off view? Which technologies, patterns, designs.. would you go with and why? As a side note - would you consider a sort of distributed pattern, like bitchute is doing with bit torrent? |
* choose a front-end language your team is comfortable with, because it will need to be written quickly and be maintained * choose a back-end language for the same reasons * decide whether you're going with an SPA and start splitting requirements * start with `ffmpeg` as your transcoder because it's free and easy * plan for the scale you expect * auto-deployment on the cloud for the machines converting video * messaging so the app can add transcoding jobs to the queue, and the transcoders can take jobs from the queue, and status of jobs reported to the user * research royalties you'll need to pay for the various types of video (MPEG-LA is a good place to start for h.264) * do this _early_ * choose your tech based on your team's experience and comfort * sometimes you'll need to hire to expand the comfort * prefer OSS over commercial to start, but be prepared to spend money for support * unless you need some specific functionality that is only available commercially
And a hundred other things :)
I've done this a couple of times for companies in the past (Primerica, ConocoPhillips), including transcoding _during_ uploading a couple of years before anyone else (like encoding.com) was doing it (totally bragging, yes).