Cloud storage is increasingly becoming less free. You can’t go long before your iPhone or Google account notifies you that you’re almost full or already full – and give you a link to a handy-dandy subscription. But there is one place where you can upload all you want and the storage is still free – YouTube.

Adam Conway wrote up a fun little program that does exactly that. He creates video frames full of data and uploads them to YouTube. He tried QR codes, but YouTube compression artifacts made that untenable. Instead, he went brute force and each 1 or 0 was a 5×5 block of pixels set to the same color. At 1920×1080, that generates about 10KB of storage per frame.

He fired it up and gave it a whirl. It worked! He even posted the code on github. It’s definitely too slow and uses a tremendous amount of storage. To use for any meaningful data as you need to take the input file and encode each bit into a 5×5 pixel in an image, then encode the images together into a video file.

Still, it’s the one free place on the internet.

Article:

• https://www.xda-developers.com/youtube-as-storage-data-to-video/