So here’s something random for the day: a guy decided to test the image and sound degradation that happens when you upload a video to YouTube, download it from YouTube, upload it again to YouTube, and on and on. And here’s the kicker: he did it 1,000 times.
Even more odd is the psychadelic (oh yes, I just used that word…) result:
Crazy, right?
A lot of sites have been explaining it in detail, which I’ll sum up, but it seems to me the best explanation is by Michael Keaton in Multiplicity. You remember that movie, right? He makes copies of himself and the copies progressively become less intelligent. (Pizza Steve!)
What really happens is that every time you upload a video to YouTube it gets encoded again by their servers. (Yes AMers, much like your work each week is encoded on the site!) When a video is encoded it gets compressed which takes out small details from the image and audio, leaving behind some artifacts. Done again, the missing details and added artifacts become a bit more noticeable.
This works for us as viewers as our brains are great at filling in the missing parts — so much so that we don’t notice most of the time. So compressing a video once is fine as our brain makes up for the missing pieces.
The problem you run into is when you continue to strip the video of details and continue to add artifacts. However one may argue that the end result is more interesting to watch than the original:
