YouTube as Storage: Store Any File as a Video

📼 What if you could use YouTube as a free, unlimited hard drive?

yt-media-storage is an open-source C++ project that converts any file into a lossless video, uploads it to YouTube, and downloads/decodes it when you need it back.

🔧 How it works:

1. The file is split into chunks
2. Encoded with fountain codes (Wirehair) for redundancy
3. Packed into 4K at 30 FPS video frames using lossless FFV1/MKV codec
4. The video is uploaded to YouTube
5. To recover: download the video and decode it

✨ Features:

• Optional encryption with XChaCha20-Poly1305 (libsodium)
• CLI and GUI interface (Qt6)
• Batch processing for multiple files
• Windows, Linux, and macOS support

# Encode
./media_storage encode --input my_file.zip --output video.mkv

# Decode
./media_storage decode --input video.mkv --output my_file.zip

⚠️ For experimental use. YouTube may remove content if it detects it’s not a normal video.

💡 Explanation in a nutshell

#

The idea is simple: a YouTube video is basically a sequence of images. If each pixel of each frame represents bits of your file, you can store arbitrary data disguised as video. With a lossless codec, the data can be recovered perfectly. It’s a creative hack that exploits YouTube’s free storage limits.

More information at the link 👇

GitHub - PulseBeat02/yt-media-storage: Encodes files into uploadable media

Encodes files into uploadable media. Contribute to PulseBeat02/yt-media-storage development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com ↗