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YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

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Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#131
post #17

This works on the same principle as the video backup system (VBS) which we used in the 1980's and the early 1990's on our Commodore Amigas: if I remember correctly, one three hour PAL/SECAM VHS tape had a capacity of 130 MB. The entire hardware fit into a DB 25 parallel port connector and was easily made by oneself with a soldering iron and a few cheap parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcBY6PMH0Kg SGI IRIX also…

That's how digital audio was originally recorded to tape back in the 1970s and 80s: encode the data into a broadcast video signal and record it using a VCR.

In the age of $5000 10 MB hard drives, this was the only sensible way to work with the 600+ MB of data needed to master a compact disc.

That's also where the ubiquitous 44.1 kHz sample rate comes from. It was the fastest data rate could be reliably encoded into both NTSC and PAL broadcast signals. (For NTSC: 3 samples per scan line, 245 scan lines per frame, 60 frames per second = 44100 samples per second.)

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like 99% of academic papers

Most papers at least sound like they're notable!

The less jam you have, the more you spread it out.

The opposite is also true. Brilliant ideas have lead to papers that can read obvious and terribly unremarkable.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#133
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends and I had a joke called NSABox. It would send data around using words that would attract the attention of the NSA, and you could submit a FOIA request to recover the data. I always found it amusing.

There's a feature in Emacs that does that (unsurprisingly.) It's called `M-x spook'. It inserts random gibberish that NSA and the Echelon project would've supposedly picked up back in the 90s.

spook.el was "introduced at or before Emacs version 18.52". And 18.52 was released in 1988. And spook.el in a comment says

    ;; Created: May 1987
So the things that the NSA and ECHELON would have picked up on back in the 1980s, not the 1990s :)

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#134
post #26

Turns out any site that allows users to submit and retrieve data can be abused in the same way: - FacebookDrive: "Store files as base64 facebook posts" - TwitterDrive: "Store files as base64 tweets" - SoundCloudDrive: "Store files as mp3 audio" - WikipediaDrive: "Store files in wikipedia article histories"

This is pretty tame compared to some actual, practical ones such as https://github.com/apachecn/CDNDrive

For people who don't read Chinese: it encodes data into ~10M blocks in PNG and then uploads (together with a metadata/index file as an entry point) to various Chinese social media sites that don't re-compress your images. I knew people have used it to store* TBs after TBs data on them already.

*Of course, it would be foolish to think your data is even remotely safe "storing" them this way. But it's a very good solution for sharing large files.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#135

This reminds me of an old hacky product that would let you use cheap VHS tapes as backup storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid You would hit Record on a VCR and the computer data would be encoded as video data on the tape. People are clever.

Early games and software would be delivered on audio cassettes that would then have to be 'played' in order to load your software temporarily into the device, which could take minutes

edit: Video from the 8-bit Guy on how this worked - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9SM9lG47Ew

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#136

This reminds me of an old hacky product that would let you use cheap VHS tapes as backup storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid You would hit Record on a VCR and the computer data would be encoded as video data on the tape. People are clever.

This is old school. When I first wrote code back in the Stone Age we used to store our stuff on cassette tape.

You had cassette tape?? Lucky... I had to write my 1's and 0's in the dirt with a stick.

Damn rain.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#137

This reminds me of an old hacky product that would let you use cheap VHS tapes as backup storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid You would hit Record on a VCR and the computer data would be encoded as video data on the tape. People are clever.

This is old school. When I first wrote code back in the Stone Age we used to store our stuff on cassette tape.

Ha ha, when I was a kid with my C64, I used my moms old reel-to-reel tape deck to store data.

I still have a C64 and tape drive.

There was a magazine in the 80’s where you could scan in the code with a bar code scanner.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#138

This reminds me of an old hacky product that would let you use cheap VHS tapes as backup storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid You would hit Record on a VCR and the computer data would be encoded as video data on the tape. People are clever.

That's not really that hacky, audio cassettes were used forever, it's just a tape backup.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#140

This reminds me of an old hacky product that would let you use cheap VHS tapes as backup storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid You would hit Record on a VCR and the computer data would be encoded as video data on the tape. People are clever.

The Alesis ADAT 8 track digital audio recorders used SVHS tapes as the medium - at the end of the day, it's just a spooled magnetic medium, not hugely different conceptually than a hard drive.
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