11 ms·
YouTube as Storage
- KellyCriterion 8mo agoI can remember the years when YouTube was used by Contentdistributors by uploading high quality material protected with a password :-D
- sneak 8mo agoSomething at this link crashes both MobileSafari and iOS Firefox on my device.
- madduci 8mo agoLove this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want
- rzzzt 8mo agoUpload to other video sharing sites for redundancy. RAIVS!
- iberator 8mo agoStop ruining the internet end exploiting free resources
- rzzzt 8mo agoIt was a tongue-in-cheek / silly suggestion outright. I don't think many people are actually using the tool for its off-ToS purpose though, there is also a lot of prior art across multiple sharing services. It's still interesting to think about the inner workings of it.
- repeekad 8mo agoI 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
- wasmainiac 8mo agoI wonder if that still holds true? The volume of videos increases exponentially especially with AI slop, I wonder if at some point they will have to limit the storage per user, with a paid model if you surpass that limit. Many people who upload many videos I guess some form of income off YouTube so it wouldn’t that be that big of a deal.
- pogue 8mo agoI assume it's an economics issue. As long as they continue making money off the uploads to a higher extent than it costs for storage, it works out for them.
- throw_await 8mo agoDo they make a profit nowadays
- rezonant 8mo agoLikely yes, with a margin of perhaps 38% https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268536
- ranger_danger 8mo agoI wonder if anyone has ever compiled a list of channels with abnormally large numbers of videos? For example this guy has over 14,000: https://www.youtube.com/@lylehsaxon https://www.youtube.com/@lylehsaxon
- 8mo ago
- zokier 8mo agoAlso, how to get your google account banned for abuse.
- newqer 8mo agoJust make sure you have you have a bot network storing the information in with multiple accounts. Also with with enough parity bits (E.g. PAR2) to recover broken vids or removed accounts.
- compsciphd 8mo agopar2 is very limited. It only support 32k parts in total (or in reality that means in practice 16k parts of source and 16k parts of parity). Lets take 100GB of data (relatively large, but within realm of reason of what someone might want to protect), that means each part will be ~6MB in size. But you're thinking you also created 100GB of parity data (6MB*16384 parity parts) so you're well protected. You're wrong. Now lets say one has 20000 random bit error over that 100GB. Not a lot of errors, but guess what, par will not be able to protect you (assuming those 20000 errors are spread over > 16384 blocks it precalculated in the source). so at the simplest level , 20KB of errors can be unrecoverable. par2 was created for usenet when a) the size of binaries being posted wasn't so large b) the size of article parts being posted wasn't so large c) the error model they were trying to protect was whole articles not coming through or equivalently having errors. In the olden days of usenet binary posting you would see many "part repost requests", that basically disappeared with par (then quickly par2) introduction. It fails badly with many other error models.
- e145bc455f1 8mo agowhat other tool do you recommend?
- iberator 8mo agojust pay for storage instead. It's absurd that rich developers are doing ANYTHING but to pay for basic services - ruining the internet for those in real need. we can't have nice things
- ranger_danger 8mo agoOther examples of so-called "parasitic storage": https://dpaste.com/DREQLAJ2V.txt https://dpaste.com/DREQLAJ2V.txt
- blackhaz 8mo agoHas 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
- equinumerous 8mo agoMostly just noise. This is an example data video from the creator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIRXaQWjiA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIRXaQWjiA8 (YouTube video for this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk)
- polotics 8mo agoWot 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 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-023-14844-w
- zahlman 8mo agoThat's harder to sneak through video compression artifacts.
- j-bos 8mo agoThis ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,
- vasco 8mo agoThat great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.
- szundi 8mo ago[dead]
- agnishom 8mo agoYou are right, but YouTube is also a massive repository of human cultural expression, whose true value is much more than the economic value it brings to Google.
- komali2 8mo agoYes, but it's a classic story of what actually happened to the commons - they were fenced and sold to land "owners." Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.
- agnishom 8mo agoThis seems like a narrow understanding of value. Which do you think has more value to me? (a) I save some money by exploiting the storage loophole (b) The existence of a cultural repository of cat videos, animated mathematics explainers, long video essays continue to be available to (some parts of) humanity (for the near future).
- komali2 8mo ago
- thrdbndndn 8mo agoI 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.)
- Jaxan 8mo agoYes it is inefficient. But youtube pays the storage ;-). (There is probably a limit on free accounts, and it is probably not allowed by the TOS.)
- genidoi 8mo agoRight, you just pay daily in worrying when, not if, youtube will terminate your account and delete your "videos".
- sdenton4 8mo agoYeah, I would assume that transcodes kill this eventually...
- brandonli28 8mo ago
- qwertox 8mo agoThe explainer video on the page [0] is a pretty nice explanation for people who don't really know what video compression is about. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk
- andrewstuart 8mo agoHow does it survive YouTube transcoding.
- tsukurimashou 8mo agomaybe something akin to what QR codes use? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_cor...
- the_dude_ 8mo agoreminds me of gmail fs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive very interesting project explanation video on youtube
- finalhacker 8mo agoafter compression, all data lost.
- Smalltalker-80 8mo agoThechnically 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.
- ilaksh 8mo agoIts interesting that this exact use case is already covered in their ToS. I wonder when the first YouTube as storage project came out, and how many there have been over the years.
- Valkryst 8mo agoAt-least as far back as 2017 when I wrote Schillsaver: https://github.com/Valkryst/Schillsaver https://github.com/Valkryst/Schillsaver None of us, in the original discussion threads, knew of it being done before then IIRC.
- altmanaltman 8mo agoI mean, it is pretty likely they figured out it could be a pretty obvious possible misuse before anyone actually started doing it.
- kingstnap 8mo agoThe idea of exploiting someone else's server to store files is incredibly old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive When Google launched Gmail (2004) with a huge 1GB storage quota, Richard Jones released GMailFS to mount a Gmail account as a standard block device.
- xnx 8mo agoAn idea as old as YouTube. Here's on implementation: https://github.com/therealOri/qStore https://github.com/therealOri/qStore
- predkambrij 8mo agoCool https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMS30w23zkQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMS30w23zkQ
- nubinetwork 8mo agoHow do you manage to get youtube to not re-encode the video, trashing the data?
- neals 8mo agoFlashing a bunch of qr codes should do it
- shevy-java 8mo agoInteresting 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.
- nunobrito 8mo agoWhat kind of storage level can be expected from this method for 10 minutes of video?
- j45 8mo agoThis is a digital version of a cassette tape to load and save data, love it! https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/storing-data-on-your-analogue-tapes-a-little-how-to.66168/ https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/storing-data-on-your-analo...
- intellirim 8mo ago[flagged]
- brandonli28 8mo agoHey there, Brandon here (developer). I've uploaded an explanation video here for anyone that's interested, which might be useful to watch :D https://youtu.be/l03Os5uwWmk?si=nJDwz4s7_E4WFOwC https://youtu.be/l03Os5uwWmk?si=nJDwz4s7_E4WFOwC
- esskay 8mo agoI imagine something like Reddit might make for better storage than this. It'd be pretty trivial to set up a few accounts with private subs too just store encrypted text based data. Not fast or anything but surely easier to work with.
- pcthrowaway 8mo agoBrilliant, but I hope it doesn't hasten Youtube's use of AI to "enhance" videos automatically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169554
- ninjagoo 8mo agoInterestingly, this is a specific implementation of a more general idea - leverage social media to store encrypted content, that requires decoding through a trusted app to surface the actual content. AI tools can use this as a messaging service with deniability. Pretty sure humans already use it in this way. In the past, classifieds in newspapers were a similar messaging service with deniability.
- up2isomorphism 8mo agoYouTube is not a place you expect your data will persist. It can disappear, unavailable for any period of time. But if you don’t care if your data is available, why bother with this thing? This is one of those seemingly “smart” but actually dumb idea.
- moritzwarhier 8mo ago> This is one of those seemingly “smart” but actually dumb idea. Your comment seems very sad to me. If you want your data to be safe, you could use physical storage though, and save the data there, on redundant physical hard disks in distributed locations, in various encodings. You could also try to add even more redundancy by using an audio track with the bit sequences as spoken words combined with a video track that is resilient to low-bandwidth encoding, for example a news show where every segment takes place in front of an info graphic representing one or two bytes per segment. Could be a giant pie chart for variable-precision floating point numbers or a giant still frame of an alphabumeric character to represent raw bytes. Add some enganging current events to the coverage to make sure the videos stay relevant. Use large fonts to keep them resilient to video compression. Combine YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo and at least two disk storage arrays to get five-nines enterprise-grade reliability. The overhead for encoding and decoding is easily outweighed by the cost-neutral added redundancy.
- google234123 8mo agoKind of stupid to do this while planning on doing a summer internship at YouTube?
- redbell 8mo agoSimilar projects from the past years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495049 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34866808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34866808