YouTube Technology

YouTube is a website where people could upload videos and share it either for a private audience or to show their videos to the world. It became so popular that thousands of videos are being uploaded everyday while millions of videos are being watched in their website or from other websites where YouTube videos are embedded.

What makes YouTube so popular? It’s the experience and not the technology behind it. YouTube use very simple technology for its video uploading, viewing, embedding and sharing. Because of its simplicity, it’s what made it such a hit!

YouTube is using Adobe Flash Technology. YouTube accepts video formats that are .mov, .avi, .mpeg, .wmv and .mp4 and once the video is uploaded, it is then converted to .FLV format.


Video playback is based on Macromedia Flash Player 7 with H.265 Sorenson Spark video codec. This makes the YouTube videos to be of quality that is comparable to other video playback technologies such as Quicktime and Windows media player that usually requires the computer to have a web browser plug-in installed before they could view the videos. Flash 7 plug-ins are normally present on many computers so viewers does not need to make any other downloads just to view the videos on YouTube.

YouTube only allows up to 10 minutes per uploaded video. This prevents the users to upload a whole movie or any other copyrighted materials. The pixel dimension is also limited of up to 320X240 pixels only and with the allowable bitrate of only 314kbit/s. Older videos are of a much better quality and you would still see some videos that are more than 10 minutes each though but in November of 2007, the newly uploaded videos were already automatically reduced in quality.

YouTube videos are also encoded using H.264 video for video streaming on Apple TV and on iPhones. Apple Incorporated has announced that Apple TV could already access YouTube after installing their free software update. iPhone users could also access YouTube through WiFi or EDGE streaming. Higher Bandwidth versions for WiFi and lower resolution for EDGE are the two versions available for each video found in YouTube. With iPhone though, you can not log in to your YouTube account although you can create your favorite lists that is separate for your iPhone which is a great compensation.


YouTube does not support any offline viewing or downloading of their videos but just like anything hackable, many third party sites websites are offering applications and extensions that allow a viewer to save videos for offline viewing or editing. If you want to do it manually, all .flv files from YouTube are located on your Temporary Internet Files folder (Windows) and you could copy those and save them on a permanent folder. These files can then be edited or converted to .mpeg, .AVI, or any other formats through .flv converters and other similar applications.

Despite many competitors sprouting here and there, YouTube still leads with a wide margin and is the name most commonly heard of when you search for a video streaming and uploading website.