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I doubt that the parts of YouTube responsible for video-related heavy-lifting (transcoding, detecting copyright infringement, etc.) are written in a dynamic language like Python, Ruby or PHP or even a managed language like Java.

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I always imagined that they just patch together a bunch of calls to mplayer and ffmpeg using a bit of shell script.. ;)

Maybe, but this won't do when you actually have to do algorithmic processing of the video (which I think Youtube does after all).

and by "algorithmic processing" I mean detecting when the video contains a pirated song, for example.

I'm sure you could script that out to somone else... :oP

YouTube optimizes their Python with psyco: http://www.slideshare.net/didip/super-sizing-youtube-with-py...

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