PHP CookBook: MyPHPTube.com (YouTube clone)

With the increased popularity of the YouTube.com service many people wanted to organize a similar service, but don’t know how to do this. If you are one of them – this article is for you

Features

First of all describe the basic site’s functions (and also determine and the role of users) :

1. Guest
   • View video online
2. Member
   • Upload videos
3. Administrator
   • Manage users
   • Manage files

WEB 2.0 Features

We need to extend base functions, because we need to get more traffic:

1. Guest
   • view comments on video
   • search for files (using categories or tags)
2. Member
   • comment on videos
   • record video from Web (using webcam)
   • assign category to video
   • assign tag to video
   • rate video
   • organize list of friends
   • manage favorites
   • send in-mails
3. Administrator
   • Manage comments
   • Manage categories

These are certainly not all the features of YouTube, but at least something to start with

Server Configuration

Our system will be based on LAMP:

• Linux
• Apache (version 2.2 and higher)
• MySQL (version 5.0 and higher)
• PHP (version 5.2 and higher)

Troubleshooting

And now describe the problems that you may encounter

Video Conversion

To gain user attention we need to allow them uploading videos in any format, but it’s more comfortable to users to get videos in one specific format (this will allow not to have a codecs-zoo on your machine and on the other hand if site requires some extra actions from user – it is very likely that user will forget your site – you know we are lazy. And what can be done with this? The answer is obvious – convert video files into a single format, and the format should be FLV. Flash-video can be viewed on most operating systems because it uses the widespread Adobe Flash Player software preinstalled on most browsers, and this format is also supported by many programs for video playback, such as MS MPlayer and almost all other players.

We need the following software tools (all opensource):

1. mencoder or FFmpeg
2. flvtool2 (need Ruby)
3. PHP Program Package (‘example.php’ contains example using mencoder) or ffmpeg class (‘ffmpeg.example1.php’ uses ffmpeg)

You can use mplayer to get additional information about original video file.

If we properly assembled and installed, we can now convert…

Upload

People did not like to sit and wait while the file is silently downloaded to a server, the users are curious, so we would have to show progress bar:

• http://www.emllabs.com/article.php?articleId=121/ (use Flash8 and PHP)
• http://tomas.epineer.se/tesupload/
• http://www.raditha.com/megaupload/
• http://www.obokaman.com/p/descripcion-y-fuentes-del-upload-php-ajax-con-barra-de-progreso-1596
• http://labs.beffa.org/w2box/demo/
• http://trydobe.com/?page_id=3
• http://ecosmear.com/relay/ (nice example, using perl)

All references are from xajax forum http://community.xajaxproject.org/viewtopic.php?pid=10100

Resources

ТIf we will use the same server for website and video conversion then website will be more dead than alive. For this purpose we will have to use another (one at least) server that will take original files from the web and put it back converted in a while. In other words we need more than 1 server to create a working solution.

Load distribution

If we store all data in one server, it will not carry the load. We must have several servers to store data :

• http://mirror1.myphptube.com
• http://mirror2.myphptube.com
• etc

You must decide themselves how to distribute the load. You have to estimate the amount of data to be stored and then choose appropriate scheme, (let’s assume that one user uploads to a server 20mb per month (234Gb for 1000 users per year), and not popular files are not stored more than a year):

• Stored data ~ 0.3Tb – 1.5Tb:we keep all the videos on each mirror. We have main mirror – server on which converted video always appears first and all other mirrors sync with it
• Stored data ~ 1.5Tb – 3 Tb:
  All videos are stored in one central server, if the video is growing in popularity, it is poured into other mirrors
• Stored data > 3Tb:
  Video is uploaded to the nearest mirror (example : assume that the video uploaded from China will be mostly popular in China, thus place it to the mirror in China) With the growing popularity of this video we will copy it to the server closest to the epicentre of popularity (example : Chinese living in the United States, the video file upload to a mirror located in the United States, watched videos in China, in this situation video file will be copied to the Chinese server)

This is not statistical numbers, they are for illustrative purposes. China cited as an example (nothing personal). Write an opinion in the comments…

DataBase

Next, I will describe simple architecture DB:

users
id	autoincrement field
login	unique login
password	encrypt password
email	user email
actcode	activation code
role	ENUM(guest/user/admin)
status	not active / active / disable
date_create
date_update	date of last change profile
date_login	date of last login
…	another fields e.g. first name, last name

friends
id	autoincrement field
user_id1	user ID
user_id2	user ID
status	request / ok / cancel
date_create	date of send request
date_update	date of accept or denied request

files
id	autoincrement field
title	title of video file
file	name of file on file system
status	not convert / in process / ok
access	public / members only / friends only / private
author_id	ID of owner (users)
category_id	ID of category (categories)
date_create
date_update	date of last changes
…	another fields e.g. length, description

mirrors
id	autoincrement field
url	mirror url
date_create
date_update	date of last changes

mirrors_link
file_id	ID of file (files)
mirror_id	ID of mirror (mirrors)
status	current file status downloading / ok
date_create
date_update	date of last changes

categories
id	autoincrement field
pid	parent category ID
name	name of category
…	another fields e.g. metadescription, metakeywords

tags
id	autoincrement field
word	tag word

tags_link
id	autoincrement field
tag_id	tag ID (tags)
file_id	file ID (files)

comments
id	autoincrement field
author_id	ID of owner (users)
file_id	file ID (files)
message	text of message
date_create

rate
id	autoincrement field
author_id	ID of owner (users)
file_id	file ID (files)
rate	integer value, e.g. for 0 to 10
date_create

messages
id	autoincrement field
author_id	ID of owner (users)
user_id	ID of recipient (users)
type	e.g. friend request-response / admin message
author_folder	outbox/draft/delete
user_folder	inbox/delete
user_status	read or not
date_create

bookmarks
id	autoincrement field
author_id	ID of owner (users)
file_id	file ID (files)
title	title of link
description	some description
date_create

A small note:

• For the columns date_create and date_update using a gmdate (’Y-m-d H:i:s’) – GMT, it will make the life easier in the future when displaying the time on the site

Team

How to gather a team to develop such a project best? I propose the following:

• 2 PHP-Developer
• Flash Developer / Designer
• 1 UNIX-administrator
• 1 Tester
• 1 Manager

Estimation

Guest
Static pages	pages e.g. “Contact Us”, “Terms of Use” etc.	1h/page
Search file	simple search by several params	6h
Tags Cloud		8h
View video	FLV video player	16h
View comments		6h
Registration	Registration and activation via e-mail	12h
Forgot password		2h
User
Login/Logout		2h
Upload file		14h
Record video	Requried media server: FMS, Wowza (from Feb 2007) or Red5 (opensource)	16h
Progress bar		16h
Send Comment		4h
Rate File		2h
Bookmarks management	create/edit/delete	8h
Admin
Users management	The names and details of members who have been registered are listed showing the date their account was created and other user info. Options are available for Administrator: view Member details, ban Members, search for existing users by First or Last name or Username etc.	16h
Categories management		16h
Others
Design		32h
Database Design		16h
Project Architecture Design		32h
Organize File Storage	From 8h to 96h	8h
Convert process		20h
Total
Environment setup	configure web-server, convert-server, mirrors	40h
Development		256h
Testing	30%-50% of all development	85h
Management	10% of all time	40h
Total: 421h

So we have 421 hours, or approximately 2.5 months of development. Did you expect such a number? I thought it will be more :)

That’s very optimistic estimation that includes several assumptions:

• the developers will use CMF system similar to phpXCore or Zend Framework
• the developers are familiar with the CMF choosen (i.e. won’t learn in while coding)
• the simplest file storage will be used (all mirrors store all files)

If development will be done from scratch you can easily multiply this assessment by 2.
Total, the project will cost at least $ 10,000…

P.S.

The main problem is not in the system, main problem is drawing audience. Who will use your service if there is YouTube (and even PornoTube)? If you have ideas, write in comments…

At the time of writing this article MyPHPTube.com domain was not registered. If you register it, send a beer at my home address… ;)