Media & streaming · Intermediate

Video streaming

Uploads to object storage, queued transcoding, playback straight from a CDN.

Every part, and why it is there

Watching is the main load. A player fetches a new few-second segment every few seconds for the whole video.

A small group uploading large files. Uploads must survive flaky connections, so they go in resumable chunks.

Serves video segments from edge servers near viewers. Popular videos are almost always cached, so origin traffic stays small.

Entry point for the API: auth, rate limits and routing. Video bytes never pass through it.

Accepts chunks, writes them to object storage, and queues a transcode job once the file is complete.

Titles, thumbnails, durations and the playlist URL. The player gets the playlist here, then streams straight from the CDN.

Original files as uploaded. Kept so videos can be re-encoded later in new formats.

One job per uploaded video. Transcoding takes minutes, so uploads finish fast and the work happens in the background.

Re-encode each video into several resolutions, cut into short segments the player can switch between as bandwidth changes.

The encoded segments and playlists. The CDN fetches from here on a cache miss.

Video records, owners and processing status. Small and relational, so plain SQL fits.

Full-text search over titles and descriptions; a database LIKE query would not rank or scale.