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Haha, from the title I expected this to be a solution for generating MP4s from arbitrary data that you could then upload to YouTube for backup. This is definit
by andrewstuart2 11y ago
Haha, from the title I expected this to be a solution for generating MP4s from arbitrary data that you could then upload to YouTube for backup.
This is definitely really cool, too. I like that it shows that a node in a filesystem is just another way to represent some resource, but in a way that's a little more familiar to most people than something like procfs.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoThat's a fascinating idea. Unlike gmail, there isn't an upper bound on how much you can store on YouTube. If you could encode data in a way that's resilient against re-encoding, you could use YouTube for steganography as well. Or, for that matter, see http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2012/09/your-youtube-original-videos-now.html http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2012/09/your-youtube-orig... . That said, it's also amazingly wasteful, and abusing a free service for a purpose it isn't intended for.
- andrewstuart2 11y agoDefinitely. And you'd have no guarantee that your video wouldn't get transcoded someday into a format or setting that corrupts it.
- thisjepisje 11y agoCan't you always download the original file if you're the uploader?
- antsar 11y agoUntil they catch on and disallow it, sure :)
- ionforce 11y agoHave a really crappy, coarse-grained visual format. Dark squares to communicate bits.
- boomzilla 11y agoInteresting. I guess we can experiment with how many bits can be compressed to a video frame. Is there a guarantee that YT doesn't change the frame rate? Another idea is YT as code repo: essentially one makes a movie that shows code files. On retrieval, OCR can be applied to transform the movie back to code in text.
- pyre 11y agoI know that YouTube used to support only up to 30fps video, but IIRC they now support 60fps. This became a thing because people making videos of themselves playing the newest generation of consoles (PS4 / XBOne) want to upload in high quality, and the consoles now do 1080p at 60fps. If this is a concern for people (recording at 60fps to upload for 60fps), I doubt that Google would downgrade the framerate except for maybe the lower quality versions of the video (does 60fps really matter for 240p video?).
- rasguanabana 11y agoMaybe using Fourier/wavelet/whatsoever transform would be the way to go, just like in digital watermarking techniques. Both high capacity and robustness would seem easier to achieve.
- Joona 11y agoSpeaking of corruption, I found this[1] video a while back. On mobile the video shows up fine, but on desktop it's just a gray screen, although the thumbnails work. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOb8TNn7sDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOb8TNn7sDE
- Houshalter 11y agoAlso the original "Leroy Jenkins" video has been corrupted by youtube.
- madez 11y agoThe video is showing fine here. I'm using the HTML Video Everywhere! extension.
- a1369209993 11y agoI can confirm that the mp4 I downloaded is not (detectably by my desktop video player) corrupt. I am not sure what it is, but it is not corrupt. (Except for the filename, but that is because javascript is brain-damaged as regards strings.)
- madez 11y agoI also have cookies and javascript disabled. Maybe the javascript is messing with the video.
- Joona 11y agoIt's just a gray screen for me in both HTML5 and Flash players, though if I download the video and play it in MPC-HC it's fine. Weird stuff!
- audiodude 11y agoHere's another video that doesn't behave well on desktop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
- bch 11y agoUnless what you were encoding wasn't meant to be consumed as a bytestream. If you encoded a resilient optical format (like UPC or QR codes), transcoding the format shouldn't be a deal breaker. Obviously it's not optimized for backing up a harddisk, though. Edit: @ionforce hints at same here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9840838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9840838
- NeutronBoy 11y agoInteresting - say video @ 60fps, encode 1 QR code per frame, would be highly resistant against transcoding errors, very easy to extract information from again given the standard format. Wouldn't be terribly efficient though. Wikipedia says max bytes per code is 2953 per QR code [1]. So 2953Bps * 60fps = 177KBps data encoding. I guess that's what you get for encoding it in a visual (human readable) format instead of a datastream directly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#Storage
- amino 11y agoyou have sound too. Must be an audio equivalent that would have a similar level of durability to a qr code. I dont know if youtube ever drops frames during compression. Perhaps using there 4k support would help get a bit more data
- bch 11y agoYou could reference this[0] vintage Commodore tech for ideas. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
- mkagenius 11y agoThey won't even take the upload, so we need not worry about the transcoding part. trying to upload a pdf file : "The video has failed to process. Please make sure you are uploading a supported file type."
- MichaelGG 11y agoWhat they meant was taking arbitrary data and turning it into a valid video file that plays back. For instance, you could read each bit off as audio (zero, one, zero, zero...). The quest is to find the most efficient, yet resilient way to do so.
- mkagenius 11y agoThey said they would like to have some encoding technique (completely new) which would get transcoded without any data loss. So, my point was that such _new_ encoding techniques will be rejected by YT in the first step itself, before even transcoding.
- MichaelGG 11y agoNo, they mean new encoding within the video and audio. A watermark is encoded in video, even though it's just visual data. Encoding can mean different things at different levels.
- rasguanabana 11y agoIf there was a way to do massive changes in existing videos it would be feasible to use them as storage - that would be a definitely interesting approach. Anyway, advanced data encoding would be needed to prevent it from damage after format changes. Well, it's not impossible and even not that hard to achieve.
- hamidnazari 11y agoAnd if you share your files (videos) you'd generate some revenue too.
- Vexs 11y agoI've toyed with the idea of it before- it's actually pretty easy to transcode files into images, and if you were more clever than I you could probably figure out how to use color to represent larger chunks of data instead of just black and white squares. It's also not size friendly mind you. The files I generated were about 2x bigger than the original file.
- OmgImAlexis 11y agoNot sure if this ever went anywhere but this came to mind. https://secure.graduateschool.vt.edu/GSITWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=StoringDataInVideo https://secure.graduateschool.vt.edu/GSITWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=...
- amelius 11y agoFrom the title, I expected this to be the filesystem used by Youtube.
- joeskyyy 11y agoGlad I'm not the only one! Cause that would be friggin awesome haha