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Okay, I understand why conversion of video formats would be slow at home. But surely sites such as Vimeo can afford custom hardware to do the encoding? I mean at least using GPU computation, and possibly even some custom FPGA hardware and the like?

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Define "atrocious". Voting to close as off-topic (there's no personal computer software involved in all of this), and apart from that it's a very subjective question. – slhck Dec 16 '11 at 9:02
Atrocious = 1 hours conversion time. – Dmitri Nesteruk Dec 16 '11 at 9:04
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Well, yes, if that's the only thing one high performance machine does at a time. And even then, video conversion of HD content is still something I consider very time-consuming. I work with videos all day, and one hour seems long for one hour of HD footage. But imagine how much traffic Vimeo gets. This goes way beyond the scope of Super User though — one would need to look into the backend of these video hosting sites. – slhck Dec 16 '11 at 9:14
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Just what exactly are they "lying" about? I wasn't aware of the sites making any promises to convert your uploads in minutes, or to give you exclusive access during conversion. YouTube already says that they receive ~48 hours of video every minute. – grawity Dec 16 '11 at 14:30
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Free internet services has made a sector of society a bunch of whiners. When was the last time You invested in something to make someone else's life easier so they would not complain? – Moab Dec 16 '11 at 16:31
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closed as not constructive by slhck, grawity, Moab, techie007, Nifle Dec 17 '11 at 12:53

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2 Answers

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Yes you are correct, and they most probalby do that already.

But imagine hundreds of videos that need converting, and I wil tell you what, sometimes I upload the same video three or four times because even though i thought it was nice, I always find something wrong with a transition or sound synchronisation..

One way of managing this process is to keep a queue in place and use the lease amount of processing power.. because allot of data centres charge per killowat..even though you can have 200CPU's and 100GPU's available..

So it would translate into something like this (theoretical and not entire factual or up to date data)

  • Instant rending of 1000 videos per hour = $1000 per hour cost

  • Queue management and intelligent use of processing power to minimize power usage = $400 per hour

  • Peak hours with 3000 videos per hour and intelligent management = $600

Imagine running 100 computers at your home, do you think your mother will be impressed with a $1000 electricity bill? Neither are the people who have to pay bills for these free servers we use.

Google server in total use so much power (all the servers in the world) that US and EU legislation are encouraging "forcing" Google to build reusable energy plants for their data centres (wind and solar) and they invest hundreds of millions for renewable energy station.

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But surely using, say, FPGAs will give massive power savings, thus cutting the electricity bill. – Dmitri Nesteruk Dec 16 '11 at 9:10
Yes but what is the actual data? How many movies do they need to render per hour? Pennies start to count at this type of volume. I tend to find out what format they want, before uploading, then pre-render it my self.. Then when it is my turn- the pre checker verifies the format,size and encoding.. and either saves it or does a quick re compress to eliminate embedded malware.. – ppumkin Dec 16 '11 at 9:21
Umm, I didn't know about prerendering... this is weird because I use Expression Encoder which has presets for Youtube and Vimeo which are supposed to match their settings exactly. And yet, I end up having to wait for conversion. :( – Dmitri Nesteruk Dec 16 '11 at 9:49
Yea- you will wait.. but not as long as sending up a HD video. Using those settings with theEcnoder is the best you can do.. Ther servers still need to do their checks, and other things.. I think you tube makes 3 copes, normal, 320p, 720p if available and into FLV .. so pre rendering with Expression is the most you can do to help speed it up.. but you wont jump the queue :( – ppumkin Dec 16 '11 at 9:53
On a side note, I recently rendered a 720p video in h.264, and when I uploaded it to YouTube, they didn't even bother making a 720p version of that :( – Dmitri Nesteruk Dec 16 '11 at 10:16
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up vote 3 down vote

It is slow in order to encourage "basic" account holders to pay for a "plus" account.

They could just rely on making you watch adverts, but it is a commercial decision they have made about how best to provide food, clothing and shelter from rain for the children of Vimeo employees and shareholders. They may be wrong of course, but as they buy the hardware, they get to choose their business model.

http://www.ethannonsequitur.com/facebook-you-customer-product-pigs.html

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+1: You get what you pay for. – surfasb Dec 16 '11 at 20:04
Great cartoon. +1 – Mr.Wizard Dec 17 '11 at 13:15
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