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.
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
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.
That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.
Have you? Assuming Google would want to not put all their chips on that one number and invest all available capital in the purchase of a nation, and assuming that nation were open to being purchased in the first place (big assumption; see Greenland), Google is absolutely still in a place to be able to purchase multiple smaller countries, or one larger one.
You are right, but YouTube is also a massive repository of human cultural expression, whose true value is much more than the economic value it brings to Google.
Yes, but it's a classic story of what actually happened to the commons - they were fenced and sold to land "owners."
Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.
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.
It only support 32k parts in total (or in reality that means in practice 16k parts of source and 16k parts of parity).
Lets take 100GB of data (relatively large, but within realm of reason of what someone might want to protect), that means each part will be ~6MB in size. But you're thinking you also created 100GB of parity data (6MB*16384 parity parts) so you're well protected. You're wrong.
Now lets say one has 20000 random bit error over that 100GB. Not a lot of errors, but guess what, par will not be able to protect you (assuming those 20000 errors are spread over > 16384 blocks it precalculated in the source). so at the simplest level , 20KB of errors can be unrecoverable.
par2 was created for usenet when a) the size of binaries being posted wasn't so large b) the size of article parts being posted wasn't so large c) the error model they were trying to protect was whole articles not coming through or equivalently having errors. In the olden days of usenet binary posting you would see many "part repost requests", that basically disappeared with par (then quickly par2) introduction. It fails badly with many other error models.
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.)
Yes it is inefficient. But youtube pays the storage ;-). (There is probably a limit on free accounts, and it is probably not allowed by the TOS.)
Right, you just pay daily in worrying when, not if, youtube will terminate your account and delete your "videos".
I think it's just meant to be a fun experiment, not your next enterprise backup site
Stegonagraphic backup with crappy ai transmogrified reaction videos. Free backup for openclaw agents so they can take over the internet lol
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
Videos do disappear, though. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1ioz4x1/is_it_...
Searching hn.algolia.com for examples will yield numerous ones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23758547
https://bsky.app/profile/sinevibes.bsky.social/post/3lhazuyn...
Of course videos disappear for copyright, ToS violations, or when the uploaders remove them. They do not disappear just because nobody watched them.
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.
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
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.
Do they make a profit nowadays
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
There is a channel with 2 million videos: https://www.youtube.com/@RoelVandePaar/videos One with 4 million videos: https://www.youtube.com/@NameLook
NameLook puts a whole new meaning to "low effort videos"
First one has transcribed stack overflow to YT by the look of it
This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,
That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.
> That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries?
Exactly which countries could they buy?
Let me guess: you haven’t actually asked gemini
Have you? Assuming Google would want to not put all their chips on that one number and invest all available capital in the purchase of a nation, and assuming that nation were open to being purchased in the first place (big assumption; see Greenland), Google is absolutely still in a place to be able to purchase multiple smaller countries, or one larger one.
Greenland already has a wealthy benefactor, I'd be surprised if poor countries wouldn't be interested
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
You don’t have to go ballistic!
The USA.
You are right, but YouTube is also a massive repository of human cultural expression, whose true value is much more than the economic value it brings to Google.
Yes, but it's a classic story of what actually happened to the commons - they were fenced and sold to land "owners."
Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.
Also, how to get your google account banned for abuse.
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.
par2 is very limited.
It only support 32k parts in total (or in reality that means in practice 16k parts of source and 16k parts of parity).
Lets take 100GB of data (relatively large, but within realm of reason of what someone might want to protect), that means each part will be ~6MB in size. But you're thinking you also created 100GB of parity data (6MB*16384 parity parts) so you're well protected. You're wrong.
Now lets say one has 20000 random bit error over that 100GB. Not a lot of errors, but guess what, par will not be able to protect you (assuming those 20000 errors are spread over > 16384 blocks it precalculated in the source). so at the simplest level , 20KB of errors can be unrecoverable.
par2 was created for usenet when a) the size of binaries being posted wasn't so large b) the size of article parts being posted wasn't so large c) the error model they were trying to protect was whole articles not coming through or equivalently having errors. In the olden days of usenet binary posting you would see many "part repost requests", that basically disappeared with par (then quickly par2) introduction. It fails badly with many other error models.
what other tool do you recommend?
Or.... backblaze B2
Love this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want
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
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
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
reminds me of gmail fs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive very interesting project explanation video on youtube
Other examples of so-called "parasitic storage": https://dpaste.com/DREQLAJ2V.txt
How does it survive YouTube transcoding.
after compression, all data lost.
Something at this link crashes both MobileSafari and iOS Firefox on my device.
The GitHub link? Works fine in Safari on my M4 iPad Pro.