I wanted to share some thoughts for an idea I had.

There are times when I want to stream data from a remote -- I want to start processing it immediately, and do not want to keep it in my annex when I am done with it.

I can give some examples:

* I have several projects which have a large number of similar text files, and they compress really well with borg or bup. For example, I have a repo with many [ncdu](https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu) json index files. They total 60G, but in a bup special remote, they are ~3G. In another repo, I have large highly differential tsv files.
* I have an annex with 5-10G video files that are stored in a variety of network special remotes. Most of them are in my Google Drive. I would like to be able to immediately start playing them with VLC rather than downloading and verifying them in their entirety.

It would look like this:

```
git annex cat "someindex.ncdu" | ncdu -f -

diff <(git annex cat "huge-data-dump1.tsv" -f mybupremote ) <(git annex cat "huge-data-dump2.tsv" -f mybupremote )

git annex cat "myvideo.mp4" -f googledrive | vlc -
```

I imagine that there might be issues with verification. But I really am ok with not verifying a video file I am streaming.

> [[dup|done]] --[[Joey]]