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YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

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Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#161

Post by anyfoo »

ben174 wrote: post #156
legitster wrote: post #121

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.

Wow, 2GB on a standard tape. For the time, that's incredibly efficient and cheap.

Yeah. Video, even old grainy VHS, had a pretty high bandwidth. Even much more so with S-VHS, which did not become super popular though. (I'm actually wondering whether the 2GB figure was for S-VHS, not VHS. Didn't to the math and wouldn't be surprised either way, though.)

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#162

Post by RedShift1 »

twh270 wrote: post #136
mobilene wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You guys had dirt?

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#163

Post by accrual »

daenz wrote: post #18

How much data can you store if you embedded a picture-in-picture file over a 10 minute video? I could totally see content creators who do tutorials embedding project files in this way.

Would storing data as a 15 or 30 FPS QR code "video" be any more useful? At a minimum one would gain a configurable amount of error correction, and you could display it in the corner.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#164

Post by layer8 »

Back in the 90’s I considered storing my backups as encrypted stenographied or binary Usenet postings, as a kind of decentralized backup, postings which would stick around long enough for the next weekly backup. (Usenet providers had at least a couple of weeks of retention time back then.)

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#166

Post by layer8 »

accrual wrote: post #165

I love that this is like tape in that it's a sequential access medium. It's storing a tape-like data stream in a digital version of what used to be tape itself (VHS).

I believe YouTube supports random access, or otherwise you wouldn’t be able to jump around in a video. Youtube-dl also supports resuming downloads in the middle, I believe.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#167

Post by jjice »

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…

That's a perfect college CS story. Beer and bastardized files - what a combo!

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#168

Post by johnvega »

Random_Person wrote: post #128
mobilene wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I still have my Atari 400 and tape drive!

My family had Atari 400 with a tape drive. I remembered buying a tape with a game. We also use it for basic programming language and the Astroids game using a cartridge.

Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos

#170

Post by rasguanabana »

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…

How about Fourier transform (or cosine, whichever works best), and keep data as frequency components coefficients? That’s the rough idea behind digital watermarking. It survives image transforms quite well.
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