ok but on the absolutely microscopic chance that someone who worked at #google on the #youtube backend actually sees this
what actually happens when i click on a video with 253 views from seven years ago and it just buffers for a dozen seconds? obviously the local youtube nodes don't have a copy of every video ever.
does it just like, copy it from The Master Server and play it from a local node? does it stream directly from The Master Server? is it just sitting in a fifteen quadrillion terabyte S3 bucket and has to be downloaded first? is it having to transcode it from some ancient format to AV1? a combination of the above?
does The Master Server have a sticker of the attached image on it?