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Comment by xtacy | Hacker News Reader

Interesting worst case scenario. (Random thought) Encoding data inside video streams might give more bandwidth, as chat msgs seem to be heavily throttled.

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Good idea! That would definitely require ripping open the plugin or compiling your own (and swapping it out when the page is loaded), but it would certainly enable a ton more bandwidth. I was really impressed when I first saw this image stenography on the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography#Digital_steganogr...

If you couldn't inject your own code into the chat plugin (or had trouble faking the packets from your own), you could do the extremely low-tech solution of videochatting a screen of a slowly-changing QR code. It would make encoding super simple and still allow for a decent amount of bandwidth transmission :D

Damnit! That's a good idea. 3k bytes per QR code, a conservative estimate of 15 fps, and you are at decent 45k a second with no code injection!

People used to do this way back when. Here's a video from a 90's TV show called NetCafe. At some point they take a break to stream some downloads to the viewers. They ask you to plugin their TV Modem to get some random shareware. Then they show a screen with a rapidly animated 2d barcode for a couple minutes. http://www.archive.org/details/nc101_hackers

I wonder how many people actually owned a TV modem. It had to be a tiny market.

By the way, I highly recommend watching the episode, they interview Aleph One and some other old-school hackers.

Wowwww this is amazingly old school. Talk about time travel.

That "download blast" section looks like it has a significant amount of bandwidth though. It's cool to see the idea implemented though

You could fit many QR codes on screen at a time.

Or, better yet, you could just send raw pixels as bits, white = 0, black = 1. With 1024x768 HD video, that's a possible 768K/Frame => 22.5M/s @ 30 FPS!

Fun I had a similar idea on April this year, I thought about using streaming png's (nodejs) as information source, first I was thinking about using some qr-code technique to make transmissions secure. Then I thought, I could use something better like qr-code multiplication inside of a png stream that looks like a video with some qr-codes that flash from time to time. A smart-phone application would make the data readable again (decryption). You would need to whisper a secret key personally into your friends ear, so he can enter the sequence into his smartphone app. All-in-all it was a concept to use png's like videos with "cut-scenes" a-like qr-code's that get multiplied and cross-checksummed afterwards. Might sound stupid, but think about it. I wasn't approaching to solve your post-apocalyptic scenario, but to make something speedier+secure than wifi/bluetooth/infrared.

What do you think? A friend who's exceptional at maths (I'm not) told me it's not possible, however I don't like when naysayers come and tell it's impossible. Still it demotivated me. Do you think it's possible?

Explained in two words: "Optical Transmission"

I saw a friend doing a transaction, that inspired me. Here's a video to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOQeZGe83YM

Are there any lossless video formats in common use? One is unlikely to be introduced if not, so you might need a lot more than one pixel/bit.

But at the same time, you don't need to limit to black-and-white. Even just black/white/red/green/blue/purple/yellow/turquoise would be four times as much bandwidth, and I would be very surprised if even lossy video couldn't reliably distingish up to 64 colours.

I don't think many people currently have 22.5M/s download speeds anyway, so it's probably not a big deal.

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