Need guidance on Video Uploader function

I have a very interesting project coming up that will require the upload and download of videos. The upload process needs to be similar to Youtube’s function although I realize IT IS YOUTUBE and that may be way too advanced for the budget.

Can anyone shed any light on 1) How to efficiently upload videos to a DB 2) Videos must be compressed upon upload, converted, etc. I’m just beginning to brain storm this so any other perspectives are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I would probably farm this out to a service – lots of options depending on budget and features and they can probably deliver it cheaper and better than you can make it. Most of the better ones have an API so you can make it quite white label.

If you need to roll your own, you probably don’t store the video assets in a db per se. Rather, you would manage metadata about the video assets with the videos themselves living on a filesystem. In terms of transcoding, check out ffmpeg – that is basically how youtube was originally built. Not alot of db programming but more shell scripts glued together with a little db.