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YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

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Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#241

Post by Denatonium »

babanin wrote: post #148
marginalia_nu wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

That sounds suspiciously similar to how I used to download large files on a shared 2GB/month data plan. My carrier didn't count incoming MMS messages towards the quota, and conveniently didn't re-encode images sent to their subscribers via their email-to-MMS gateway. So naturally, I'd SSH into my server, download what I wanted to download, and run the bash script I wrote, which split the downloaded file into MMS-sized chunks, and prepended a 1x1 PNG image to them, and then sent them sequentially through my carrier's gateway. This worked surprisingly well, and I had a script on my phone which would extract the original file from the sequence of "photos". It may still work, but I've since gotten a less restrictive data plan.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#242

Post by ALittleLight »

anyfoo wrote: post #227
ALittleLight wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not guaranteed to perform well with unknown or new codecs - true. But, the implicit assumption is that YouTube will use codecs that preserve what videos look like - not just random codecs. If that assumption holds then the image recognition model will keep working even with new codecs.

That's the thing though, "looks like" breaks down pretty quickly with things that aren't real images. It even breaks down pretty quickly with things that are real, but maybe not so common, images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI So one question would be: Does your image generation approach preserve a higher information density than big enough pixels?

Why would you assume that the images in my algorithm aren't real images? For example, you could use 256 categories from imagenet as your keys. Image of a dog is 00000000, tree is 00000001, car 00000010, and so on.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#243

Post by freedomben »

dzhang314 wrote: post #239

Hey everybody! I'm David, the creator of YouTubeDrive, and I never expected to see this old project pop up on HN. YouTubeDrive was created when I was a freshman in college with questionable programming abilities, absolutely no knowledge of coding theory, and way too much free time. The encoding scheme that YouTubeDrive uses is brain-dead simple: pack three bits into each pixel of a sequence of 64x36 images (I only us…

Nice thanks, this answered my biggest question, which was "will it survive compression/re-encoding." (yes it will). Very cool idea!

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#244

Post by freedomben »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #233
iso1210 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disturbing, she'd have been 12 at that time.

Hm, I thought she was popular in the mid '90s, but maybe it was more like the '00s?

No I'm pretty sure you're right on the timing. I was a teenager in the mid to late 90s and britney tapes were extremely common then, to the point that it was often used as a joke (much like in your story!)

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#245

Post by dzhang314 »

dzhang314 wrote: post #239

Hey everybody! I'm David, the creator of YouTubeDrive, and I never expected to see this old project pop up on HN. YouTubeDrive was created when I was a freshman in college with questionable programming abilities, absolutely no knowledge of coding theory, and way too much free time. The encoding scheme that YouTubeDrive uses is brain-dead simple: pack three bits into each pixel of a sequence of 64x36 images (I only us…

One more thing: the choice of Wolfram Mathematica as an implementation language was a deliberate decision on my part. Not for any technical reason -- YouTubeDrive doesn't use any of Mathematica's symbolic math capabilities -- but because I didn't want YouTubeDrive to be too easy for anybody on the internet to download and use, lest I attract unwanted attention from Google. In the eyes of my paranoid freshman self, the fact that YouTubeDrive is somewhat obtuse to install was a feature, not a bug.

So, feel free to have a look and have a laugh, but don't try to use YouTubeDrive for any serious purpose! This encoding scheme is so horrendously inefficient (on the order of 99% overhead) that the effective bandwidth to and from YouTube is something like one megabyte per minute.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#246

Post by Denatonium »

fomine3 wrote: post #230
umvi wrote: 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"

I found some pirates uploads video to Prezi so they get free S3 video hosting.

At one point there was a piece of software called deezcloud which exploited Deezer's user uploaded MP3 storage, allowing it to be used as free CDN cloud storage for up to 400GB of files. I don't think it works anymore, and I'm not sure if it ever worked well (I never tried it).

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#247

Post by serf »

Manuel_D wrote: post #30
advisedwang wrote: post #5

Seems like a great way to get your account closed for abuse!

If it becomes prevalent, I think YouTube would do something like slightly randomize the compression in their videos to dissuade this kind of use.

isn't the point here that the sub-pixels being produced are so large that it would take a tremendous amount of artifacts to reduce them to an unreadable state?

in other words; if YTs compression was affecting it so badly that it prevented the data from being re-read, wouldn't that compression scheme render normal video-watching impossible?

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#248

Post by ArrayBoundCheck »

dzhang314 wrote: post #239

Hey everybody! I'm David, the creator of YouTubeDrive, and I never expected to see this old project pop up on HN. YouTubeDrive was created when I was a freshman in college with questionable programming abilities, absolutely no knowledge of coding theory, and way too much free time. The encoding scheme that YouTubeDrive uses is brain-dead simple: pack three bits into each pixel of a sequence of 64x36 images (I only us…

Do you have any idea how many more bits you'd be able to use if you applied any of the encoding transformations?

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#249

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

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…

Your story reminds me of a Linus quote.

"Real men don’t use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies." -Linus Torvalds

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#250

Post by dzhang314 »

ArrayBoundCheck wrote: post #248
dzhang314 wrote: post #239

Hey everybody! I'm David, the creator of YouTubeDrive, and I never expected to see this old project pop up on HN. YouTubeDrive was created when I was a freshman in college with questionable programming abilities, absolutely no knowledge of coding theory, and way too much free time. The encoding scheme that YouTubeDrive uses is brain-dead simple: pack three bits into each pixel of a sequence of 64x36 images (I only us…

Do you have any idea how many more bits you'd be able to use if you applied any of the encoding transformations?

I'd estimate that there's an easy order-of-magnitude improvement (~10x) just from implementing a simple error-correction mechanism -- a Reed-Solomon code ought to be good enough that we can take the squares down to 10x10, maybe even 8x8 or 5x5. Then, if we really work at it, we might be able to find another order-of-magnitude win (~100x) by packing more bits into a frequency-domain encoding scheme. This would likely require us to do some statistical analysis on the types of compression artifacts that YouTube introduces, in order to find a particularly robust set of basis images.
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