YouTube as Storage
26 points
1 hour ago
| 12 comments
| github.com
| HN
thrdbndndn
5 minutes ago
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I don't get how it works.

> Encoding: Files are chunked, encoded with fountain codes, and embedded into video frames

Wouldn't YouTube just compress/re-encode your video and ruin your data (assuming you want bit-by-bit accurate recovery)?

If you have some redundancy to counter this, wouldn't it be super inefficient?

(Admittedly, I've never heard of "fountain codes", which is probably crucial to understanding how it works.)

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the_dude_
1 minute ago
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reminds me of gmail fs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive very interesting project explanation video on youtube
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qwertox
4 minutes ago
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The explainer video on the page [0] is a pretty nice explanation for people who don't really know what video compression is about.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk

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j-bos
6 minutes ago
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This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,
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repeekad
46 minutes ago
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I once asked one of the original YouTube infra engineers “will you ever need to delete the long tail of videos no one watches”

They said it didn’t matter, because the sheer volume of new data flowing in growing so fast made the old data just a drop in the bucket

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wasmainiac
41 minutes ago
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I wonder if that still holds true? The volume of videos increases exponentially especially with AI slop, I wonder if at some point they will have to limit the storage per user, with a paid model if you surpass that limit. Many people who upload many videos I guess some form of income off YouTube so it wouldn’t that be that big of a deal.
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weird-eye-issue
18 minutes ago
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What they said only holds true because the growth continues so that the old volume of videos doesn't matter as much since there's so many more new ones each year compared to the previous year. So the question is more about whether or not it will hold true in the long term, not today
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pogue
39 minutes ago
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I assume it's an economics issue. As long as they continue making money off the uploads to a higher extent than it costs for storage, it works out for them.
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throw_await
9 minutes ago
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Do they make a profit nowadays
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ranger_danger
28 minutes ago
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I wonder if anyone has ever compiled a list of channels with abnormally large numbers of videos? For example this guy has over 14,000:

https://www.youtube.com/@lylehsaxon

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andrewstuart
1 minute ago
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How does it survive YouTube transcoding.
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zokier
43 minutes ago
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Also, how to get your google account banned for abuse.
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newqer
15 minutes ago
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Just make sure you have you have a bot network storing the information in with multiple accounts. Also with with enough parity bits (E.g. PAR2) to recover broken vids or removed accounts.
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blackhaz
23 minutes ago
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Has anyone got an example how such a video looks like? Really curious. Reminds me of the Soviet Arvid card that could store 2 GB on an E-180 VHS tape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

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madduci
47 minutes ago
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Love this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want
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polotics
15 minutes ago
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Wot no steganography? Come on pretty please with an invisible cherry on top! :-) Here to get you started: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-023-14844-w
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ranger_danger
43 minutes ago
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Other examples of so-called "parasitic storage": https://dpaste.com/DREQLAJ2V.txt
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sneak
48 minutes ago
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Something at this link crashes both MobileSafari and iOS Firefox on my device.
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Hamuko
43 minutes ago
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The GitHub link? Works fine in Safari on my M4 iPad Pro.
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