YouTube as Storage

149 points121 comments13 hours ago
repeekad

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

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Smalltalker-80

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.

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j-bos

This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,

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thrdbndndn

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.)

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ninjagoo

Interestingly, 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.

zokier

Also, how to get your google account banned for abuse.

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pcthrowaway

Brilliant, but I hope it doesn't hasten Youtube's use of AI to "enhance" videos automatically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169554

polotics

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

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blackhaz

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

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esskay

I 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.

xnx

An idea as old as YouTube. Here's on implementation: https://github.com/therealOri/qStore

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madduci

Love this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want

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brandonli28

Hey 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

qwertox

The 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

KellyCriterion

I can remember the years when YouTube was used by Contentdistributors by uploading high quality material protected with a password :-D

shevy-java

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.

ranger_danger

Other examples of so-called "parasitic storage": https://dpaste.com/DREQLAJ2V.txt

nunobrito

What kind of storage level can be expected from this method for 10 minutes of video?

nubinetwork

How do you manage to get youtube to not re-encode the video, trashing the data?

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the_dude_

reminds me of gmail fs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive very interesting project explanation video on youtube

andrewstuart

How does it survive YouTube transcoding.

j45

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...

finalhacker

after compression, all data lost.

sneak

Something at this link crashes both MobileSafari and iOS Firefox on my device.

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