Feb 15, 2011 10:52 GMT  ·  By

YouTube decided Valentine's Day was as good a day as any to boast about its incredible strides in upload speed. While companies always tout their products, the numbers YouTube is sharing are quite impressive, in the past two years alone, the processing speed of uploaded videos increased seven times.

Google puts a lot of emphasis on speed and for good reason. People get accustomed to any improvement very fast and always expect more. And with the cost of switching being close to zero in many cases on the web, the competition is cutthroat.

"Few things can be more frustrating than waiting for what feels like years for that amazing video you just shot to finish uploading to the site so you can publish it and share it with your friends," YouTube writes.

"Today, as we look at 2011, we’d like to review our progress in improving the processing and publishing speed for videos. By processing and publishing, we mean what happens behind the scenes between the moment you press the YouTube upload button to the moment that video appears on the site for your friends to see," it explains.

More and more people are uploading more and more videos to YouTube. 35 hours of video are uploaded each minute and the figure has grown tremendously in the past year alone.

But it's not only that more videos are uploaded, they're also bigger, with the prevalence of HD cameras, and longer, especially now that YouTube has upped or, in some cases, removed the time-limit for videos.

YouTube says it is fighting this, trying to get the processing time down, in several ways. One way it's doing this is by starting to process the file before it finishes uploading.

This makes it available soon after being uploaded, though the 'one-pass' processing doesn't lead to the best quality possible. Better versions become available later, after YouTube is done processing them as well.

Another method employed by YouTube, which it dubs the Hydra, is splitting the file in small chunks which are then processed in parallel by Google's massive computing centers. Once all of them are finished, the file is pieced together again to form a complete video.

Using these and other methods, YouTube has made big strides in this area. It says that videos, on average, are processed seven times faster than in 2008. More impressive, it's four time faster than it was six months ago.

Finally, 60 percent of all videos uploaded to YouTube are live and ready to share in under a minute. That's even more impressive considering that no video went live so fast just a year ago.