February 14, 2026
From playlists to payloads
YouTube as Storage
Turning cat videos into a secret hard drive—genius or ban bait
TLDR: A new tool hides files inside YouTube videos so you can upload and later recover them, effectively using YouTube like free cloud storage. Commenters are split between calling it brilliant and warning it’s a fast track to account bans, with some saying YouTube’s vast storage means it won’t even notice.
A new DIY tool promises to turn your regular files into YouTube videos you can upload and later download back into the original file. Think of it as hiding your documents inside a 4K video, with optional password protection. The maker even ships a command-line and a clicky app—cue the comment section meltdown. Some are dazzled by the cleverness; others see a Terms-of-Service time bomb.
The hottest take: “How to get your Google account banned for abuse,” warned one skeptic, as users debated whether turning YouTube into a personal dropbox is smart or reckless. Another commenter said they asked an early YouTube engineer about deleting old, unwatched videos and were told “old data [is] just a drop in the bucket,” fueling the “they’ll never notice” crowd. Meanwhile, someone claimed the project link crashed both iPhone browsers, adding a side-quest of chaos. One user dropped a rabbit hole of “parasitic storage” examples, sparking a meme wave of “hide your secrets in a playlist named ‘8 Hours of Rain.’”
Between the applause for hacker ingenuity and the warnings about channel wipeouts, the vibe is half science fair, half TOS chicken. It’s wild, it’s nerdy, and it’s got everyone asking: backup hack or ban-speedrun
Key Points
- •Media Storage encodes arbitrary files into lossless video (FFV1 in MKV) for storage on YouTube and decodes them back to the original file.
- •Provides both a CLI (media_storage) and a GUI (media_storage_gui), with batch processing, progress tracking, and threaded operations for responsiveness.
- •Uses Wirehair fountain codes to add redundancy and enable repair during decoding; optional encryption via libsodium using XChaCha20‑Poly1305.
- •Build artifacts for CLI and GUI are available via a CI/CD pipeline with guest access; dependencies include CMake 3.22, C++23, FFmpeg, libsodium, OpenMP, and Qt6.
- •Cross-platform installation instructions are provided for Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora/CentOS, Arch Linux, macOS (Homebrew), and Windows (vcpkg); project is licensed under GPLv3 or later.