eoussama/true-drive repository overview

⁠True Drive CLI

True Drive stores files as noise videos, so that any platform that hosts video can double as file storage. This image encodes a file into a video of black and white pixels, and decodes that video back into the original file.

⁠Quick start

Run these commands from the folder that holds your file. That folder is mounted at /data, which is where the tool resolves relative paths.

Encode a file. This creates video.mkv:

docker run --rm -v "${PWD}:/data" eoussama/true-drive encode -i input.txt -o video

Decode the video back into a file:

docker run --rm -v "${PWD}:/data" eoussama/true-drive decode -i video.mkv -o restored.txt

In the Windows Command Prompt, use -v "%cd%:/data". In Git Bash on Windows, put MSYS_NO_PATHCONV=1 before docker run.

If you use Podman, replace docker with podman and use the full image name, docker.io/eoussama/true-drive.

⁠Usage

<encode|decode> -i <input file> -o <output path>

• Both paths must be inside the mounted folder.
• The folder that -o points into must already exist.
• The command exits with 0 on success and 1 on failure, with the reason printed to standard error.

⁠Intermediate files

Each run creates a true_drive_encode_<timestamp> or true_drive_decode_<timestamp> folder next to the output, containing the video's frames. These folders are kept after the run and can be deleted by hand. Encoding a 2 MiB file leaves about 2.6 MB behind.

⁠File permissions

The container runs as a non-root user with ID 1000. If your user on Linux has a different ID, run the container as your own user:

docker run --rm --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -v "${PWD}:/data" eoussama/true-drive encode -i input.txt -o video

With rootless Podman, add --userns=keep-id instead.

⁠Known limitations

• Input files must be smaller than 64 MiB.
• Only .mkv videos can be decoded.
• There is no error correction, so decoding needs every pixel to be intact. Platforms such as YouTube re-compress uploads, which makes decoding fail.
• Videos are stored as PNG images inside Matroska, which many media players and upload sites don't support.

⁠Source and license

• Source code: true-drive/cli⁠
• Core library: true-drive/core⁠
• True Drive is licensed under the Apache License 2.0⁠. The image also contains FFmpeg and Alpine Linux packages, which are under their own licenses.