We're often asked "how much disc space and traffic do I need for my videos"?
The standard answer is: it depends!
But from what does it depend?
It generally depends on:
- the number of videos in total
- the average length of the uploaded videos
- the number of formats the videos will be transcoded to
- the quality settings of the transcoded videos
- the number of video views/downloads on the website
As you usually cannot estimate the number of videos that will be uploaded to your VIMP portal, we want to give you some approximate benchmarks, based on the following assumptions.
Assumptions:
- Average video length: 3 min
- 33% share of 1080p uploads
- 33% share of 720p uploads
- 16,5% share of 480p uploads
- 16,5% share of 360p uploads
- Transcoding to mp4 (1024px in width) for desktop playback
- Transcoding to m4v (480p) for smartphones
- Transcoding to additional 720p (desktop and smartphone)
- Transcoding to additional 480p (desktop and smartphone)
- Average video size for 1 min of 1080p video: 49 MB
- Average video size for 1 min of 720p video: 11 MB
- Average video size for 1 min of 480p video: 6 MB
- Average video size for 1 min of 360p video: 4 MB
- Average video size for 1 min of 720px in width video: 9 MB
Based on the above assumptions we get an average value of hard disc space that is required for each uploaded video of 180 MB in total.
This value is calculated by the size of the source video (that also remains on the web server), plus the size of the transcoded video formats.
So, the following number of videos are possible with the following disk spaces:
- 100 GB disc space: 560 videos
- 500 GB disc space: 2800 videos
- 1000 GB disc space: 5600 videos
- 2000 GB disc space: 11200 videos
Of course, these are only theoretical calculations. The actual number of videos that can be stored within a certain disc space vary with the actual length of the videos, the quality of the source videos as well as the number of formats that the videos will be transcoded to. But based on the above values you should be able to deduce your own figures.
In regard to the traffic we make the following assumptions:
- 60% views with default format (1024px width)
- 20% views with 720p
- 20% views with 480p
- Average video size for 1 min of 1024px in width video: 9 MB
- Average video size for 1 min of 720p video: 11 MB
- Average video size for 1 min of 480p video: 6 MB
Hence we come to the following results:
- Traffic limit 1 TB: 39.700 possible downloads/views
- Traffic limit 2 TB: 79.400 possible downloads/views
- Traffic limit 4 TB: 158.800 possible downloads/views
- Traffic limit 5 TB: 198.500 possible downloads/views
- Traffic limit 10 TB: 397.100 possible downloads/views
Again, these are only theoretical benchmarks that shall help to find an approximate figure of your estimated traffic.
