Monday, October 1, 2012
Last night, shortly before 01:00 UTC, “Gangnam Style,” the latest viral video on YouTube, has reached 330 million views, becoming the fastest so far to do so. The video, which premiered on July 15, 2012, has achieved this number in only eleven weeks (77 days). The number 330 million holds significance as being the number of bytes in a 5-minute MOV file. Although text documents (.txt) are small and take up only 10-30 kilobytes even if one writes a five-paragraph high school essay, audio or digital recordings take up much more space much more quickly. The obvious drawback is that, due to the sheer size of even relatively short digital/audio recordings, if you use a folder on your PC to store the videos you recorded with your camera or phone, you’ll fill up your hard drive relatively quickly. Audio and digital media are very memory-consuming; the rate is an astonishing 1,100,000 bytes per second. This means if you store a 13-minute video, you’ll end up with an MOV file that is 858 million (858,000,000) bytes in size. Even Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (which at the time of this writing is the most-viewed viewed video on YouTube, and it has held this title since July 2010) doesn’t have that many views! A 17-minute video is larger than a gigabyte (1,122,000,000 bytes). One gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes (230 = 1,073,741,824). A video of 70 minutes in length is larger than the 32-bit limit (232 = 4,294,967,296).
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