Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah seems way easier than adding a link in the description
Links die. As long as the video exists, the files that the video uses will always exist.
As if videos don't die...
YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
231–240 of 316 posts
Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#232Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#233Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#234The code looks not too big (a single file). But it requries a paid symbolic language (Mathematica) to be used. Anyone with better Mathematica knowledge explain if it can be ported to another symbolic (Sage, Maxima) or non-symbolic languages (R, Julia, Python)
Yep! I'm the creator of YouTubeDrive, and there's absolutely nothing in the code that depends on the symbolic manipulation capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica -- you could easily port it to Python, C++, whatever. However, there are two non-technical reasons YouTubeDrive is written in Mathematica:
(1) I was a freshman in college at the time, and Mathematica is one of the first languages I learned. (My physics classes allowed us to use Mathematica to spare us from doing integrals by hand.)
(2) I intentionally chose a language that's a bit obtuse to use. I was afraid that I might attract unwanted attention from Google if YouTubeDrive were too easy for anybody to download and run.
Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#235Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#236Before broadband was widely available, TiVo used to purchase overnight paid programming slots across the US and broadcast modified PDF417 video streams that provided weekly program guide data for TiVo users. There's a sample of it on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfUgT2YoPzI but they usually wrapped a 60-second commercial before and after the 28-minute broadcast of data. There was enough error correction in…
That is really interesting. I wonder if there were any other interesting uses of paid programming to solve problems like these around that time?
Videonics DirectED, a video editing system, conveniently loaded its software from... VHS tape. Here are some details: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1325945997160165376 and apparently you can still buy it well-preserved as new old stock, complete with the VHS software tape: https://www.ebay.com/itm/124380109086
A little less crazy and more straightforward (software on audio tape was super common after all): Radio stations and vinyl discs that transmitted programs to the microcomputers of the time (C64, TRS-80 etc.) have quite a long tradition. Some examples:
http://www.trs-80.org/basic-over-shortwave/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_CZpFqvDQo&t=2s
Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#237I remember my friend did something like this on an old unix system.
Users were given quotas of 5Mb for their home directory. He discovered that filenames could be quite large, and the number of files was not limited by the quota, so he created a pseudo filesystem using that knowledge, with a command line tool for listing, storing and retrieving files from it. This was the early 90s
Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#238Before broadband was widely available, TiVo used to purchase overnight paid programming slots across the US and broadcast modified PDF417 video streams that provided weekly program guide data for TiVo users. There's a sample of it on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfUgT2YoPzI but they usually wrapped a 60-second commercial before and after the 28-minute broadcast of data. There was enough error correction in…
That is really interesting. I wonder if there were any other interesting uses of paid programming to solve problems like these around that time?
Not quite paid programming, but Scientific Atlanta had a Broadcast File System that would send data to set top boxes over coax QAM channels used for digital TV. It would loop through all the content on the "carousel" repeatedly so all the boxes connected to that head end would eventually see the updates.
Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#239Hey 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 use RGB values 0 and 255, nothing in between), and then blow up these images by a factor of 20 to make a 1280x720 video. These 20x20 colored squares are big enough to reliably survive YouTube's compression algorithm (or at least they were in 2016 -- the algorithms have probably changed since). You really do need something around that size, because I discovered that YouTube's video compression would sometimes flip the average color of a 10x10 square from 0 to 255, or vice versa.
Looking back now as a grad student, I realize that there are much cleverer approaches to this problem: a better encoding scheme (discrete Fourier/cosine/wavelet transforms) would let me pack bits in the frequency domain instead of the spatial domain, reducing the probability of bit-flip errors, and a good error-correcting code (Hamming, Reed-Solomon, etc.) would let me tolerate a few bit-flips here and there. In classic academic fashion, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to implement these extensions :)
Re: YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
#240This reminds me of SnapchatFS[1], a side project I made about 8 years ago (see also HN thread[2] at that time).
From the README.md:
> Since Snapchat imposes few restrictions on what data can be uploaded (i.e., not just images), I've taken to using it as a system to send files to myself and others.
> Snapchat FS is the tool that allows this. It provides a simple command line interface for uploading arbitrary files into Snapchat, managing them, and downloading them to any other computer with access to this package.