


YouTube says that a 4K video with a frame rate of 30 fps that is 60 minutes long can take up to 4 hours to finish high-resolution processing. For your 4K video, this time can take quite a bit longer as the video is 4 times the size. The time it takes to process depends largely on how long the video is, the resolution your video has been exported in and the video quality (i.e. This means that a 10-minute video can take between 5 minutes and 10 minutes to process completely. In general, for every minute of video uploaded, it can take between 30 seconds and 1 minute to complete processing for HD videos. How long does it take for a video to process on YouTube? Why does video processing on YouTube take so long? Because YouTube has to compress files, store the files, create multiple versions of the files, and then prepare the files so they can be consumed by viewers in their best quality. For this, YouTube has a number of data centers around the world ( 5 or 6 from Google) where all of this data is sent and stored, and popular videos are put into YouTube’s CDN (Content Distribution Network) which is a network of servers around the world that allows you to access the video files as quick as possible.Īnd if all of that didn’t sound like quite a lot of work, YouTube is constantly doing this for the 400 hours of video that is uploaded every minute.

Now YouTube is a global service and depending on where you are in the world, you expect a video to play immediately. This means that if you uploaded a standard 1080p video file, YouTube needs to make 5 different versions! all the way up to the maximum quality that you uploaded the video in. If you click on the gear icon of a video, you’ll see that you can watch a video in 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p (HD), 1440p, etc. Here’s a great example of this from MKBHD.Īdditionally, YouTube is making copies of this file in a number of different formats. YouTube is compressing your original video file, this is why you may notice some quality loss when you download your original file from YouTube. When you upload a video to YouTube, a number of things are happening which can take a lot of time to complete. What is video processing and why does it take so long? What to do if your YouTube video processing is stuck.Top tip to make sure your videos are fully processed when publishing.Why are my videos blurry on YouTube after uploading?.How long does a 20 minute video take to process on YouTube?.How long does it take for a video to process on YouTube?.What is video processing and why does it take so long?.
