Show HN: Compression-Resistant Data Transfers
2 days ago
- #Youtube
- #data-compression
- #video-encoding
- Repo contains experiments encoding arbitrary data into video files that survive Youtube compression.
- Live demo available at https://iancaling.com/steg/.
- Current solution works 99% of the time, 100% under ideal conditions (no Youtube round-trip).
- Data encoding: each byte converted to a 'tile' (rectangle with one of 256 colors).
- Palette tuned to resist Youtube's compression.
- One video frame contains as many tiles as fit (e.g., 3600 16x16 tiles in 720p = 3.6kB data).
- Video files are 5-6x larger than unencoded data (compression ratio ~1:5-6).
- Example: encoded frame with byte values 0-255, decoded using `uv run decode_frame`.
- Commands: `uv run encode_file` to encode, `uv run decode_video` to decode full videos.
- WebGPU directory includes `index.html` for local video decoding using GPU compute shader.