This project is a simplified system design implementation of a video hosting and streaming platform inspired by YouTube. It focuses on how large media files are uploaded, processed, stored, and delivered efficiently to users at scale.
Video platforms must handle large file uploads, process media into multiple formats, and deliver content efficiently across different devices and network conditions. This project explores how to design a simplified version of a video platform that supports uploads, playback, and scalable content delivery.
- Understand media upload and processing pipelines
- Learn how large files are handled in backend systems
- Explore video storage and retrieval strategies
- Understand content delivery concepts (CDN-style distribution)
- Learn tradeoffs between latency, cost, and quality
- Explore asynchronous processing workflows
- Build intuition for media-heavy distributed systems
- Upload large video files
- Handle chunked or resumable uploads (conceptual)
- Validate and store raw media files
- Transcoding into multiple resolutions (360p, 720p, 1080p conceptually)
- Generate thumbnails
- Extract metadata (duration, format, etc.)
- Stream video content to users
- Support multiple quality levels (adaptive streaming conceptually)
- Retrieve video metadata and playback URLs
- Video listing per user
- Basic search or discovery (simplified)
- Video metadata storage
- Handles incoming video files
- Stores raw uploads temporarily
- Asynchronous workers process videos
- Transcoding and thumbnail generation
- Produces final streaming-ready assets
- Stores original and processed video formats
- Metadata database for video information
- Serves video content to clients
- Conceptual CDN for fast distribution
- Handling large file uploads reliably
- Asynchronous processing vs synchronous constraints
- Storage costs vs performance tradeoffs
- Bandwidth optimization and video quality
- Failure recovery in processing pipelines
- Scalability of media-heavy workloads
- Message Queue (processing pipeline backbone)
- Distributed Systems (storage and delivery scaling)
- Load Testing (streaming performance under traffic)
- Caching system (hot video optimization)
- Monitoring (encoding pipeline health and latency)
🟡 Planned