alt Hacker NewsYouTube as Storage
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Clever hack, but I'm curious about the failure modes. YouTube re-encodes everything — how much data corruption do you get on a round trip? And what happens when YouTube decides to change their compression algorithm? Feels like storing your backups inside someone else's blender.
This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,
Thechnically cool, but ToS state: "Misuse of Service Restrictions - Purpose Restriction: The Service is intended for video viewing and sharing, not as a general-purpose, cloud-based file storage service." So they can rightfully delete your files.
I don't get how it works.
> Encoding: Files are chunked, encoded with fountain codes, and embedded into video frames
Wouldn't YouTube just compress/re-encode your video and ruin your data (assuming you want bit-by-bit accurate recovery)?
If you have some redundancy to counter this, wouldn't it be super inefficient?
(Admittedly, I've never heard of "fountain codes", which is probably crucial to understanding how it works.)
Has anyone got an example how such a video looks like? Really curious. Reminds me of the Soviet Arvid card that could store 2 GB on an E-180 VHS tape.
An idea as old as YouTube. Here's on implementation: https://github.com/therealOri/qStore
Wot no steganography? Come on pretty please with an invisible cherry on top! :-) Here to get you started: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-023-14844-w
Interesting idea. But I actually think we need to overcome Google. Google has become such a huge problem in so many domains. There need to be laws for the people; Google controls way too much now. YouTube should become a standalone company.
I can remember the years when YouTube was used by Contentdistributors by uploading high quality material protected with a password :-D
Love this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want
What kind of storage level can be expected from this method for 10 minutes of video?
This is a digital version of a cassette tape to load and save data, love it!
https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/storing-data-on-your-analo...
The explainer video on the page [0] is a pretty nice explanation for people who don't really know what video compression is about.
Other examples of so-called "parasitic storage": https://dpaste.com/DREQLAJ2V.txt
How do you manage to get youtube to not re-encode the video, trashing the data?
reminds me of gmail fs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive very interesting project explanation video on youtube
How does it survive YouTube transcoding.
after compression, all data lost.
Something at this link crashes both MobileSafari and iOS Firefox on my device.
I once asked one of the original YouTube infra engineers “will you ever need to delete the long tail of videos no one watches”
They said it didn’t matter, because the sheer volume of new data flowing in growing so fast made the old data just a drop in the bucket