Guy uploads, downloads, then re-uploads the same video to YouTube 1,000 times

by jazzychad • 16 years ago

209 104 16 years ago

Was the aspect of using YouTube's servers so critical to the artistic quality of this project that he couldn't just substitute a shell script that encodes the video 1000 times over? Would've taken a heck of a lot less time than the year he spent.

ghurlman• 16 years ago

The benefit is that all 1000 videos are available on YouTube - you can check out the quality at any step along the way.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but couldn't he have written a shell script that did the uploading and dowloading to Youtube? How would we know if he did?

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

Despite what you might think, the majority of the planet has no clue what a shell script is.

dschobel4• 16 years ago

Savages.

jazzychad• 16 years ago

Perhaps, in addition to the artistic aspect of it, he wanted to educate people about what actually happens to video when it is sent to youtube. This is much more relatable than saying, "I wrote this shell script..." Also, having the log of all 1000 versions on youtube is interesting as well.

The other thing about art is that time is usually not a large motivating factor...

jemfinch• 16 years ago

The thing is, I'm not convinced that it's youtube's fault; apparently he converted it to mp4 on his own computer after the download from youtube, before re-uploading it. I wonder if he'd have had the same effect if he'd uploaded the same format he ripped from youtube.

kno• 16 years ago

There are clear reasons why not everyone is an artist, patience and endurance is are a huge part of it.

nexneo• 16 years ago

He proved that point at #100, I guess. And you really think this as an art?

eli• 16 years ago

Sometimes the artistic process is just as important as the final product.

patio11• 16 years ago

A lot of modern art is sold as a story, and for whatever reason the kind of folks who matter think that "did something by hand a thousand times" is a much better story than "wrote a Perl script."

Art isn't the only thing that has stories, incidentally. Tomatoes have stories these days. (OK, the kind of tomatoes rich people eat have stories. Only poor people eat tomatoes that have no stories.)

alexyim• 16 years ago

Are you just making the blind assumption that he's a programmer?

Tichy• 16 years ago

One year means he could have spent 364 days learning how to program and do all the 1000 uploads on the final day of the year...

sohooo• 16 years ago

Yeah, I immediately thought of this t-shirt when reading your comment :) http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/frustrations...

orlandu63• 16 years ago

Yes it was. The guy wanted to encode the videos using Youtube's _unknown_ encoding process. Encoding using ffmpeg with its default settings isn't the same. (We can now extrapolate Youtube's encoding logic rather than make blind assumptions, which would be the case if the latter were done instead.)

FlorinAndrei2• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure they use (perhaps a custom version of) x264 to encode video.

FlorinAndrei2• 16 years ago

Because "YouTube" has a meaning for regular people, while "x264" doesn't.

kierank• 16 years ago

A lot of people I speak to associate x264 with pirated film downloads.

nerme• 16 years ago

There is a rather large spiritual aspect to mankind's creation of art.

If you look at the history of art, in the western world and elsewhere, it is strongly tied to some sort of religion.

Religious practice typically implements some sort of repetitive behavior or meditation, where the goal is not necessarily to get something done in the physical world.

If you run the process through some sort of reductionist approach, you wouldn't have art to begin with. Why even make a piece of art? What's the point?

While it is interesting to view the creation of art through the lens of an engineer, any attempt to criticize the work through only this lens is not going to stand up very well.

MikeCapone• 16 years ago

#1000 looks like an alien from another dimension trying to communicate with us.

It's the modern version of photocopying something tons of times..

Certainly a good education about lossy compression for the non-technical public.

ddemchuk2• 16 years ago

I'm sure Youtube loved getting spammed with a 1000 very similar videos

matthew-wegner• 16 years ago

Probably not as much as they loved an interesting story about YouTube on prominent websites.

ddemchuk2• 16 years ago

come on now, it's youtube, they're the second most used search engine in the world. They don't really need good press anymore

daten2• 16 years ago

In that same year, how many much less interesting videos do you think were uploaded? I doubt they noticed.

slackito• 16 years ago

The process reminds me of this post: http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/355-How-I-M...

jpablo• 16 years ago

Great post, I wonder if the trick that photoshop is pulling is really beneficial or worse in the long term.

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

The "Angry Video Game Nerd" guy did a similar thing with two VHS tapes, copying a video back and forth over and over:

http://www.cinemassacre.com/2010/05/26/vhs-generation-loss/

igravious• 16 years ago

so: prior art?!

studer• 16 years ago

It's his take on Alvin Lucier's famous "I Am Sitting in a Room":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfssj80oNuM

The original recording is linked from the Mashable article.

nitrogen• 16 years ago

As was alluded to in the comments there, most of the loss was probably due to stretching and demagnetization of the two tapes. Generational loss would most likely consist of horizontal scanline offset (due to time base skew) and horizontal blurring, though eventually the time may get off far enough to cause some of the other artifacts seen in that video.

kurtosis• 16 years ago

I'm too lazy to look this up, but did the video get smaller or larger with the iteration number? This is more interesting to me than the look

kylemathews• 16 years ago

Time: yes File size: yes

Not sure why the time dropped.

faboo• 16 years ago

I'm not a video expert, but I did write some software for muxing and demuxing for a company I worked for some time ago. The major problem I had was that video and audio are stored at different "frame rates" (almost in a literal sense). A frame of encoded audio is generally shorter (in seconds of playback) than a single video frame is displayed on screen for. So, if you were cutting and splicing video, you'd end having to decode the audio, break apart the first and last frame's worth of it, re-encode it, and then offset the timing of the audio from the video. This is very obnoxious to get perfect.

I've got no idea if that's what impacted this guy's video though, but I'm sure it's far from the only weird thing involved in video compression.

ars5• 16 years ago

He mentions this on the comments for the 1000th video, for some reason youtube would sometimes remove the last frame.

Also he had trouble with youtube adding a small offset to the audio, to the point that he had to start editing the videos to re-sync the audio.

illumin8• 16 years ago

Sometimes this effect of multiple lossy compressions is very apparent on certain... ahem... adult sites, which steal content from other adult sites. When the content has been decompressed and recompressed enough times certain artifacts start to appear, as well as other issues like aspect ratio problems.

mmaunder2• 16 years ago

What's the difference between an artist and a Perl programmer? 364 days and 23 hours.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

And the Perl programmer has disposable income and a girlfriend.

fuzzmeister• 16 years ago

Well, let's not go overboard here...

nandemo• 16 years ago

Wait, in what part of the world is a programmer more likely than an artist to have a girlfriend?

TotlolRon• 16 years ago

The artist hit the front page.

gloob• 16 years ago

So did a rumour about .NET code running on the iPhone.

eavc• 16 years ago

I get and appreciate that joke, but there sure is a smug sense of superiority from the programmers in this thread.

mmaunder2• 16 years ago

You should see the shit us Perl programmers take from the Ruby guys.

idoh2• 16 years ago

I did something like this - I took an image and rotated it a couple hundred times in Windows Explorer. It gradually degraded into a blurry blob.

sp332• 16 years ago

Which is pathetic, since it's possible to do a lossless (I mean not incrementally lossy) rotation of JPG's.

pbhjpbhj• 16 years ago

MS Windows (XP IIRC) used to warn you if you used the built in image rotation function for JPEGs that it was lossy. I've a feeling it was fixed in SP2 but I've not used MS Win for years so am not really sure.

oomkiller• 16 years ago

He probably could have saved a lot of time with a shell script :)

bitwize• 16 years ago

I bet Christopher (prawn protagonist of District 9) might be able to grok the bizarre utterances in the 1000th video... but I can't.

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

I'm surprised it continued to change after detail was lost. Seems like there would be some measurable property of a codec/decode process that could be quantified - the entropy? It would be a desirable property to be 'idem-potent', e.g. after one cycle the result settles.

pyre• 16 years ago

> codec/decode

I think that you meant: 'code/decode.' 'codec' is a abbreviation for 'code/decode.'

yanowitz• 16 years ago

Does this mean YouTube's compression settings don't target a specific bit-rate but instead aim to make it "no larger than X and at least y% smaller" than what was uploaded?

I'm surprised it's not just a pass-through at a certain point (if nothing else, that'd save CPU cycles).

zokier• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1402382

Apparently it was himself who re-encoded the video, not youtube. Dont know where jemfinch got that info though.

daten2• 16 years ago

And youtube serves content in different resolutions (SD vs HD) and formats (flash vs ipod). It's possible his choice of either of these had a negative effect on the quality. It's also possible it all happened during his on conversion on his local machine.

I wonder what results he would have gotten if he pulled the h264 copy down that is served to apple devices and uploaded it without modifying it.

ars5• 16 years ago

I can understand the video getting messed up, but what happened to the audio? From what I understand re-encoding an mp3 doesn't do much - all the waveforms that were going to be thrown out, were already the first time. On the second pass nothing much changes.

Or did he rip the video using speakers and mic, rather than downloading the digital data from youtube?

I have a feeling the errors came during the ripping process, not the encoding process.

celoyd2• 16 years ago

re-encoding an mp3 doesn't do much

Sure it does, typically. It’s no different from video in this way: ideally, all of the image features that would get thrown out were thrown out the first time, but the codec isn’t that smart.

Most implementations of lossy compression algorithms don’t have stability under re-encoding as a goal. (A few do – some image editors are smart about passing through unchanged JPEG blocks, for example, and I think mp3wrap will join MP3s cleanly.)

I’m too lazy to look into exactly how he did this, but it’s not impossible that the audio artifacts came from pure MP3^n re-encoding. It’s a case that most compressors ignore.

jerf• 16 years ago

Why hypothesize? Create a directory. Copy your favorite MP3 into it as both "source.mp3" and "orig.mp3". (orig.mp3 is just for convenient comparison later.) Then:

    for i in {1..100}; do lame source.mp3 dest.mp3; mv -f dest.mp3 source.mp3; done

Then listen to the resulting "source.mp3" at the end. Send whatever params to lame you want in that command line, though the defaults strike me as pretty good for this test.

BTW, when people point out that scripting this is easy, they're not kidding. We're talking shell one-liner here, forget even hitting perl.

I'm on about iteration 7 as I write this and it's definitely breaking down.

bg4• 16 years ago

Now he needs to splice them all into a single video showing the gradual degradation over time.

presidentender• 16 years ago

The HN community could have saved a lot of time writing a shell script to post a snide comment about writing a shell script from every account instead of forcing everyone in the thread to do it individually.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

I think that, simply, this sort of art is quite different from what large parts of the HN crowd would consider artistic/beautiful.

(personally: doesn't do anything for me as art)

kree10• 16 years ago

I wasn't familiar with the audio piece that inspired this so I downloaded the mp3 from http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html . It turned out to be a nice background soundtrack for programming today.

Music with words usually distracts me when I'm working, but this didn't.

jsz02• 16 years ago

Next time the topic of bandwidth caps comes up remember this guy. I don't want to knock his project but I think it illustrates a point that unlimited bandwidth and access to services tends to make people less concerned about using bandwidth efficiently.

mos1b2• 16 years ago

He used hundreds of hours of his time. What makes you think he would've refrained from paying a few extra dollars for the bandwidth?

jsz02• 16 years ago

Nothing. I'm sure he probably would have if forced to. I know from my own (bad) habits I often waste bandwidth just because I can. Common example of this is having a file downloaded to my laptop sitting in my backpack but instead of taking it out, waking it up, mounting the share and copying it I'll just re-download it from the Internet instead because I'm lazy and there's really no downside for me.

bdr• 16 years ago

Here's the inspiration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room

Vivtek• 16 years ago

What's really cool about this is that his stated purpose ("to remove all human characteristics from both my voice and my image") is fulfilled by his voice and the individual frames - but the way the shapes move is still very human. A lot more human than CGI animation is still doing, actually.

That's neat.

twodayslate• 16 years ago

My speakers were on full blast - the 1,000th uploaded one scared the crap out of me! :O

gills• 16 years ago

Wow. It's like a lesson in wavelet transforms for the layman. But without ever using the word 'wavelet.' Cool.

stellar678• 16 years ago

It's really interesting to note the differences in our perceptions of the final audio versus the final video.

The video, while severely degraded, is obviously still a human figure moving around.

The audio, on the other hand, is mangled completely beyond recognition.

Guy uploads, downloads, then re-uploads the same video to YouTube 1,000 times

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