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YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

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Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#141

Post by softfalcon »

anyfoo wrote: post #118

I only looked at the example video, but is the concept just "big enough pixels"? Would be neater (and much more efficient) to encode the data such that it's exactly untouched by the compression algorithm, e.g. by encoding the data in wavelets and possibly motion vectors that the algorithm is known to keep[1]. Of course that would also be a lot of work, and likely fall apart once the video is re-encoded. [1] If that's…

Agree it would be cool to be "untouched" by the compression algorithm, but that's nearly impossible with YouTube. YouTube encodes down to several different versions of a video and on top of that, several different codecs to support different devices with different built-in video hardware decoders.

For example, when I upload a 4K vid and then watch the 4K stream on my Mac vs my PC, I get different video files solely based on the browser settings that can tell what OS I'm running.

Handling this compression protection for so many different codecs is likely not feasible.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#143

Post by lb1lf »

-Back in the day when file sharing was new, I won two rounds of beer from my friends in university - the first after I tried what I dubbed hardcore backups (Tarred, gzipped and pgp'd an archive, slapped an avi header on it, renamed it britney_uncensored_sex_tape[XXX].avi or something similar, then shared it on WinMX assuming that as hard drive space was free and teenage boys were teenage boys, at least some of those who downloaded it would leave it to share even if the file claimed to be corrupt.

It worked a charm.

Second round? A year later, when the archive was still available from umpteen hosts.

For all I know, it still languishes on who knows how many old hard drives...

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#144

Post by adolph »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #64
bityard wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of content do you upload? (Should "content" be in air quotes? :P)

Lol yeah. It's just recordings of myself when I'm doing deep work. I use OBS to stream my computer screen and a video recording of myself (mostly me muttering to myself). It helps me avoid getting distracted (I feel like I'm being watched lol) and it's also interested to check back if I want to see what I was working on 3 months ago. All the videos are unlisted or private.

Isn't that what Twitch is for?

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#145

Post by throwaway92394 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #87
throwaway92394 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just gotta add some good 'ol steganography

Good luck preserving it through YouTube's video compression. It's super lossy with small details, in bad cases the quality can visibly degrade to a point it looks more like a corrupted low-res video file for a few seconds (saw that once in a Tetris Effect gameplay video).

I mentioned it in another comment, but while that does lower the bandwidth of a single frame, its not actually an issue. There's several DRM techniques that can survive a crappy camera recording in a theater.

"compression resistant watermark" turns up some good resources for it. QR codes are another good example of noise tolerant data transmission (fun fact - having logos in a QR code isn't part of the spec, you're literally covering the QR code but the error-correction can handle it).

The best way I can describe it is that humans can still read text in compressed videos. The worse the compression/noise the larger the text needs to be, but we can still read it.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#146

Post by marginalia_nu »

lb1lf wrote: post #143

-Back in the day when file sharing was new, I won two rounds of beer from my friends in university - the first after I tried what I dubbed hardcore backups (Tarred, gzipped and pgp'd an archive, slapped an avi header on it, renamed it britney_uncensored_sex_tape[XXX].avi or something similar, then shared it on WinMX assuming that as hard drive space was free and teenage boys were teenage boys, at least some of those…

Poor guys, still looking for the right codec to play the britney tape they downloaded 28 years ago.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#147

Post by anyfoo »

softfalcon wrote: post #141
anyfoo wrote: post #118

I only looked at the example video, but is the concept just "big enough pixels"? Would be neater (and much more efficient) to encode the data such that it's exactly untouched by the compression algorithm, e.g. by encoding the data in wavelets and possibly motion vectors that the algorithm is known to keep[1]. Of course that would also be a lot of work, and likely fall apart once the video is re-encoded. [1] If that's…

Agree it would be cool to be "untouched" by the compression algorithm, but that's nearly impossible with YouTube. YouTube encodes down to several different versions of a video and on top of that, several different codecs to support different devices with different built-in video hardware decoders. For example, when I upload a 4K vid and then watch the 4K stream on my Mac vs my PC, I get different video files solely b…

Yes, but nothing is saying this has to work for every codec. Since you want to retrieve the files using a special client, you could pick the codec you like.

But (almost) nothing prevents YouTube from not serving that particular codec anymore. This still pretty much falls under the "re-encoding" case I mentioned which would make the whole thing brittle anyway.

But it's indeed cool to think about. 8)

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#148

Post by babanin »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #75
8K832d7tNmiQ wrote: post #55

I remember seeing this first discussed at 4chan /g/ board as a joke wether or not they can abuse Youtube's unlimited file size upload limit, then escalated into a proof of concept shown in the repo :)

This is a tangent. I must have been maybe 15-16 at the time, so somewhere around 20 years ago: One of the first pieces of software I remember building was a POP3 server that served files, that you could download using an email client where they would show up as attachments. Incredibly bizarre idea. I'm not sure who I thought would benefit from this. I guess I got swept up in RFC1939 and needed to build... something.

On my first job (in the beginning of the millennium) there was a limit on files you could download, something around 5Mb. If you wanted to download something bigger, you had to ask sysadmins to do that and wait... That was really annoying. So I and my colleague end up writing a service, that could download a file to local storage and chop it into multiple 5Mb attachments and send multiple emails to requestor.

After some time the limit on single file was removed, but daily limit was set up to 100Mb. The trick is that POP3 traffic wasn't accountable, so we continued to use our "service".

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#149

Post by adolph »

Saint_Genet wrote: post #74

Makes me wonder how many video and image upload sites are now used as easily accessible number stations these days

Probably not many. The advantage of plain old-fashioned radio is that the station doesn't keep track of the receivers. Whoever watches a YouTube numbers station is tracked six ways to Sunday.
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