Show HN: YouTube Filesystem – YTFS

by rasguanabana • 11 years ago

185 61 11 years ago

Interesting! Looks like this is youtube-dl combined with FUSE, so that you can use a normal video player to play and filesystem tools to browse, rather than downloading first. See https://github.com/rasguanabana/ytfs/blob/master/doc/depende... .

andrewstuart23• 11 years ago

Haha, from the title I expected this to be a solution for generating MP4s from arbitrary data that you could then upload to YouTube for backup.

This is definitely really cool, too. I like that it shows that a node in a filesystem is just another way to represent some resource, but in a way that's a little more familiar to most people than something like procfs.

JoshTriplett2• 11 years ago

That's a fascinating idea. Unlike gmail, there isn't an upper bound on how much you can store on YouTube. If you could encode data in a way that's resilient against re-encoding, you could use YouTube for steganography as well. Or, for that matter, see http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2012/09/your-youtube-orig... .

That said, it's also amazingly wasteful, and abusing a free service for a purpose it isn't intended for.

andrewstuart23• 11 years ago

Definitely. And you'd have no guarantee that your video wouldn't get transcoded someday into a format or setting that corrupts it.

rasguanabana8• 11 years ago

If there was a way to do massive changes in existing videos it would be feasible to use them as storage - that would be a definitely interesting approach. Anyway, advanced data encoding would be needed to prevent it from damage after format changes. Well, it's not impossible and even not that hard to achieve.

hamidnazari• 11 years ago

And if you share your files (videos) you'd generate some revenue too.

Vexs• 11 years ago

I've toyed with the idea of it before- it's actually pretty easy to transcode files into images, and if you were more clever than I you could probably figure out how to use color to represent larger chunks of data instead of just black and white squares. It's also not size friendly mind you. The files I generated were about 2x bigger than the original file.

OmgImAlexis• 11 years ago

Not sure if this ever went anywhere but this came to mind. https://secure.graduateschool.vt.edu/GSITWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=...

amelius• 11 years ago

From the title, I expected this to be the filesystem used by Youtube.

joeskyyy• 11 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one! Cause that would be friggin awesome haha

aikah• 11 years ago

how is it a filesystem? can I store a PDF or zip file on youtube with that ?

andrewstuart23• 11 years ago

I'd imagine it's read only, much like parts of procfs.

rasguanabana8• 11 years ago

It's read-only - you can play/copy youtube movies as a file

njharman• 11 years ago

Storing a pdf or zip file is not a requirement nor definition of a filesystem. You can do neither of those with a CDROM or DVD and both those contain filesystems.

kalmi10• 11 years ago

It seems not to support streaming. It has to download the whole video before playing can begin.

rasguanabana8• 11 years ago

Some time ago Youtube started to provide audio and video separately. Due to that, for full videos whole data needs to be downloaded before reading (it's hard to merge them on-the-fly). For just audio or just video data streaming is intended, but needs reimplementation.

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

Are you sure ? youtube-dl still gives link to plain old streamable mp4 (I don't know much, I just use it half blindly).

zeeed• 11 years ago

kudos, that's an excellent idea, combining out-of-the box thinking, data structuring, creating value all using basic tools. A tip to the hat. Nice work!

fragmede• 11 years ago

Neat! Any plans to make the different video qualities quickly available? Maybe as a subdir named with the resolution, eg search/movie/480p.mp4 or maybe movie.1080p.mp4?

rasguanabana8• 11 years ago

Oh, I don't want to clutter it too much, it's better to keep it simple.

It definitely needs a mount option to set the default quality. Changing it later might be tricky, maybe passing options in directory names would be a good idea? for example: mkdir "foobar [q:720p]"

omribahumi• 11 years ago

How about doing it with mount options, so someone would mount /mnt/youtube/hires /mnt/youtube/lowres with different options?

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

side-note: I find it very very interesting to think about a filesystem of unknown content and size. It's basically an infinite tree through FUSE. Nothing crazy, but interacting with it directly is inspiring.

nitrogen• 11 years ago

Back in the kernel 2.2 days there was an explosion of experimental filesysyems, like ftpfs, cdfs/cdripping fs, and more. Now that we have widespread FUSE bindings it seems we'll see a filesystem renaissance.

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

Right but ftp/cd are finite data sets. So far nobody has access to youtube full index and the virtual fs has to generate/navigate on the fly. Imagine a GoogleSearchFS, makes things a little different.

fiatjaf• 11 years ago

Are there any installations instructions? This seems to depend on a lot of libraries that are not specified anywhere.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 11 years ago

The file system is a great UI that doesn't pretend to be a great UI. Thanks!

dfrey• 11 years ago

The world would be a better place if we could run "rm -rf ./comments/*" on YouTube.

TimJRobinson• 11 years ago

Theres a chrome extension called alientube that shows reddit comments instead (useful for finding obscure niche subreddits too). Or there's plenty of extensions to hide comments.

tomswartz07• 11 years ago

My favorite is 'Herp Derp for YouTube'.

It changes every comment to a mix of

Derp herpy derp derp

while still allowing you to click and see the "quality" comment that the person left.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/herp-derp-for-yout...

anukulrm• 11 years ago

This is great! Also, check out this easter egg which makes every video rick roll haha: https://github.com/rasguanabana/ytfs/blob/master/stor.py#L12...

walterbell• 11 years ago

Does this use a persistent cookie which YouTube can use to personalize search results?

rasguanabana8• 11 years ago

There's no authorisation at the moment. Plain requests.get is used.

rian• 11 years ago

Might I recommend not using the prev/next executables and instead adding another directory level to indicate search page, e.g. ytfs/search/1/video.mp4

would make it easy to reexport this file system, e.g. Over http or smb.

rasguanabana8• 11 years ago

I have to think that through. Search pages are tricky as you can't simply go to a certain page. They're identified by tokens, which aren't known a priori - you just get adjacent ones with search results.

A reasonable solution would be ability to set max results and disabling next/prev. All desired results would show up in the search directory (if you can assume that results beyond some point are useless).

mappu• 11 years ago

I think the most obvious way to expose that remote behaviour in the filesystem is to have the directory /search/2/ appear only after the directory /search/1/ has been stat'd.

Show HN: YouTube Filesystem – YTFS

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