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Comment by sevenf0ur

4 years ago

Probably breaks TOS under video spam

Just gotta add some good 'ol steganography

  • This brings up an interesting question: what is the upper-bound of hidden data density using video steganography? E.g. how much extra data can you add before noticeable degradation? It's interesting because it requires both a detailed understanding of video encoding and also understanding of human perception of video.

    • I've seen drone metal videos where the video and audio could both be 90% steganography and I wouldn't know the difference.

    • I'd expect you could store more data steganographically than the raw video data.

      You can probably do things like add frames that can't be decoded and so are skipped by a decoder; that effectively allows arbitrary added hidden data. That's maybe cheating.

      If you stipulate that you can't already have a copy of the unaltered file, and the data has to be extractable from a pixel copy of the rendered frames ... that becomes more interesting, I think.

      1 reply →

    • A pretty massive amount I imagine. I attended a lecture on single image steganography and they were able to store almost 25% of the image's size and it was barely visible. Even 50% didn't look too bad.

      Extending that into video files and it would likely be pretty massive, although you'd have some interesting time with youtube's compression algorithms

  • Good luck preserving it through YouTube's video compression. It's super lossy with small details, in bad cases the quality can visibly degrade to a point it looks more like a corrupted low-res video file for a few seconds (saw that once in a Tetris Effect gameplay video).

    • I mentioned it in another comment, but while that does lower the bandwidth of a single frame, its not actually an issue. There's several DRM techniques that can survive a crappy camera recording in a theater.

      "compression resistant watermark" turns up some good resources for it. QR codes are another good example of noise tolerant data transmission (fun fact - having logos in a QR code isn't part of the spec, you're literally covering the QR code but the error-correction can handle it).

      The best way I can describe it is that humans can still read text in compressed videos. The worse the compression/noise the larger the text needs to be, but we can still read it.

yeah wonder how long until the ban, also bans all of your descendants for 10 generations?