Which is the best way to build a video website? (YouTube competitor)

Everyone has different learning styles and approaches so your likely to get different recommendations. If your looking to start fresh from the ground up and go all the way- I would recommend starting at the beginning with the web design track and working your way forward through the front end dev track and eventually the PHP & Ruby On Rails tracks. This way you get to see the whole picture front-end to back-end. There's a few side courses you'd probably want to check out in the library as well such as UX design.

I certainly don't want to be a downer I am all about ambitious ideas, but I think your underestimating the amount of work/knowledge/man-power that goes into huge scale sites like YouTube.com. Plus I think you would be doing yourself a disservice to focus so specifically on one project like that you may accidentally limit yourself by trying to study things you think are specific to the project when you really need a complete education to achieve something of that scale...if that makes sense...

Yes absolutely, everything has to begin with a seed as it were, and like you say learning will give perspective on the scope of the project and with dedication and some networking with local developers you can definitely get started on that path.

On a purely practical note, lets take into account what exactly makes up a site like youtube:

I think we can all agree on the following:

FULL-STACK development is what you need to understand firstly, a firm understanding of what that is and why is imperative. Google that.

A simple breakdown of any site of that caliber is as follows (generally):

Front end is built with: HTML, CSS, JS.

Server-side language to bridge front and back ends ie: PHP or RUBY (although I believe youtube was actually built with python)

Back end language for build databases: SQL, MySQL, NoSQL etc

Database knowledge: familiarity with servers themselves ie: Apache, Windows 2008 etc

Read up on your Protocols!!!

Plus a working knowledge (or really good team) as to how these all communicate so you can properly execute new tasks on your site.

If your really serious about this, start with at the top of this list and work your way down like Austin suggested, and keep your eye out for others that may specialize in something on the other end and build a small team to start a something small then scale from there!

Also I am not trying to dissuade you with all this text I just have a lot of free time today and was interested in breaking this down.

Google and wikipedia are your friends (and treehouse of course).

Hope that that's the level of definition you were looking for Good luck and keep at it, like Austin said use that motivation to push through and obtain as much knowledge as you can. Anything is possible. But seriously look for team-mates.

Corey

No problem man check out the "GIT" video on here for a lesson on Version control systems, sites like GIThub.com are great resources for maintaining projects with people around the globe.

Good Luck keep us posted