YouTube (unlisted) — with DCT/fountain-coded payload
- Free allowance
- No total storage cap.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institution?placeholder, not evidence; card unknown, phone unknown
- Binding limit
- per-ip-shaping47 Mbps
- Evidence
- reported4 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | No total storage cap. Per-upload max 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever is less. Unverified accounts are limited to 15-minute videos; phone verification lifts that. unit GB; metered on stored-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
A daily upload-count cap exists but Google does not publish the number; its own tier page only distinguishes 'limited daily limit' (unverified) from 'higher daily limit' (phone-verified). The Data API v3 path is capped near 6 uploads/day (~1600 quota units each against a 10,000/day budget). 12-hour duration ceiling means a 256 GB file must average 47 Mbps to be reachable. |
| Identity | institution (inferred, not read) not published |
| Egress | Free and unmetered — playback and yt-dlp retrieval are served from Google's CDN at no cost; there is no egress meter on the account. |
| Per-object cap | not stated |
| Retention | not stated |
| Interface | rest rest |
| Tooling | yt-dlp (youtube extractor, verified present in yt-dlp --list-extractors; 1752 extractors total). Binary-in-video: freddiev4/yts3 (FFV1/DCT + fountain codes, 2 stars, pushed 2026-02), KKarmugil/Infinite_Storage_Glitch (188 stars, Python ISG port), karaketir16/file2video (70 stars). |
| Composes with | Unlimited files per channel x unlimited free Google accounts. Each upload is independently 256 GB-capped, so capacity = N accounts x M videos x 256 GB. Upload throughput, not quota, is the binding constraint. |
| Reliability | From a datacenter IP, yt-dlp hit Sign in to confirm you're not a bot on 2 of 3 probe videos and HTTP 429 on the watch page — retrieval reliably needs cookies or a residential egress. Data does not vanish, but the account can be terminated and the whole channel with it. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 4
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | support.google.com/youtube/answer/71673 | 'The maximum file size you can upload is 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever is less'; 15-minute default for unverified accounts |
| 2026-10-21 | support.google.com/youtube/answer/57407 | 'There's a limit to how many videos a channel can upload each day'; no number given |
| 2026-10-21 | www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ` | probe: `yt-dlp -F -> 720p/1080p/1440p/2160p renditions only (av01, vp9, avc1), no original stream |
| 2026-10-21 | github.com/freddiev4/yts3 | 'converts any file into an FFV1/MKV lossless video ... embedding data into 8x8 DCT blocks', fountain codes 'for surviving re-encoding' |
Unknown values 4
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- per object cap stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read