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Something at this link crashes both MobileSafari and iOS Firefox on my device.
Love this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want
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

I seem to recall reading that the HD variations may get removed leaving only 480p or lower for older unwatched videos.

The original upload would likely still be stored, but not available for viewing.

Also, how to get your google account banned for abuse.
This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,
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.)

He encodes bits as signs of DCT coefficients. I do feel like this is not as optimal as it could be. A better approach IMO would be to just ignore the AC coefficients altogether and instead encode several bits per block into the DC. Not using the chrominance also feels like a waste.
Thechnically cool, but ToS state: "Misuse of Service Restrictions - Purpose Restriction: The Service is intended for video viewing and sharing, not as a general-purpose, cloud-based file storage service." So they can rightfully delete your files.
How do you manage to get youtube to not re-encode the video, trashing the data?
I can remember the years when YouTube was used by Contentdistributors by uploading high quality material protected with a password :-D
Interesting idea. But I actually think we need to overcome Google. Google has become such a huge problem in so many domains. There need to be laws for the people; Google controls way too much now. YouTube should become a standalone company.
What kind of storage level can be expected from this method for 10 minutes of video?
I imagine something like Reddit might make for better storage than this. It'd be pretty trivial to set up a few accounts with private subs too just store encrypted text based data. Not fast or anything but surely easier to work with.
Interestingly, this is a specific implementation of a more general idea - leverage social media to store encrypted content, that requires decoding through a trusted app to surface the actual content.

AI tools can use this as a messaging service with deniability. Pretty sure humans already use it in this way. In the past, classifieds in newspapers were a similar messaging service with deniability.