What’s The Longest YouTube Video Ever?

When I was in grammar school there was a book drive every year, and one of the hot sellers of the day was The Guinness Book of World Records. We like to know records because statistical information is interesting. And of course there’s bragging rights for being "that guy" or "that girl" who did something first/best/etc.

To the best of my knowledge, the current record holder for the longest YouTube video was posted by YouTube user ahmon123 with the video ORIGAMI BOX DESTROY. The video has a total running time of 478 hours, 48 minutes and 5 seconds. That’s 19.95 days or 2.85 weeks. The video is nothing special to see as it’s nothing but random colors, but it is the longest running YouTube video.

You’ll notice the video was posted just over 3 years ago on Feb. 10, 2008. Nobody has been able to post a longer video since, but believe me, many have tried.

What keeps people from posting longer video to bust the record? Browser limitations and YouTube itself.

If you encoded a video at the bare minimum 320×240, used super-high compression and a very low frame rate, it is totally possible to have a 500-hour video that is under 2GB in size. Think "old cell phone video quality". Yes, it will look terrible, but the point is it can be done. A problem encountered however is sending that amount of data through the browser. Any browser. They simply weren’t designed to push through data of that size for a single file, and for most people the upload speed is throttled by the ISP directly.

With FTP, sure, multi-GB files aren’t a problem when sending even on the slowest connection because that protocol was designed for files first. HTTP on the other hand is a text protocol first, so when trying to push a file over 1GB in size, server timeouts are common and transfer crash recovery is more or less nonexistent.

Now of course there’s always going to be that guy who says "I’ve been sending files over X size for a long time through a browser and have had no problems", blah blah blah frickin’ blah. Well, good for him, because if you try it, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a server timeout. If HTTP was such a great protocol for sending large stuff, video sites like blip.tv wouldn’t need to offer an FTP method for transferring super-large video files.

Then there is the issue of YouTube itself. While that site plus others will easily accept many-hour video, unofficially you start to encounter problems when sending something that’s over 100 hours (4.17 days) long.

Now you may be thinking, "Why in the world would anyone want to post a video online that long?" In this instance it’s all about bragging rights. It doesn’t matter what the video content is, but rather who has the absolute longest YouTube video ever. Whoever can "destroy the origami box" so to speak by posting a video over 478.8 hours long will be the new champ.

Tips for those that have a YouTube account that allows long-form video and think they can make the new record:

It’s most likely true you won’t be able to post your 500-hour video from your home ISP connection, but if you have access to a co-located server with a really fast and stable data pipe, that would be the way to go about it. Send your video file from home to the co-located server via FTP, then use a remote graphical session (VNC most likely) to push the file over to YouTube direct from the server. The faster you can get the file pushed to YouTube, the higher the chance the file will successfully transfer, process and post.