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VIDEO ROOM 1000 COMPLETE MIX -- All 1000 videos seen in sequential order!

ontologist0 HN recommenders · 2018–2023
2.4M views · other · evergreen · Uploaded 2010-06-09

A condensed rendition of a project that re-uploaded one video to YouTube 1000 times, showing the accumulating compression artifacts. It pays homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.

Cited as a vivid demonstration of generation loss from repeated lossy re-encoding.

Information theory & signal processingAudio & video engineeringCreative coding & generative art

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5 comments from Hacker News

@esotericsean2018 · in “Depixelizing Pixel Art (2011)”

I remember back in like 2010, someone uploaded and ripped a YouTube video 1000 times and then edited the natural degradation of the compression. Went from perfectly watchable video to horrible static-y mess. Here it is! [VIDEO]

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@majewsky2020 · in “No Paint”

If you don't have 15 minutes to waste on exposition, this is the first video that did this, and it's only 3 minutes total: [VIDEO]

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@TonyTrapp2022 · in “Each visit to the page deteriorates the main image”

The experiment has also been brought to the 21st century and its video and audio codecs: [VIDEO] - uploading a video 1000 times to YouTube.

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@vel0city2023 · in “The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux”

You're not understanding how lossy compression encoders work. Try recompressing a JPEG a few dozen times. Or take an MP3 and export it from Audacity, open the export, export as MP3 again a dozen times and see what it sounds like. All those artifacts keep getting amplified every time you re-encode until it's practically just the artifacts. Every time you render and recompress you're losing information, it's lossy compression after all. [VIDEO]

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@fnands2023 · in “I Am Sitting in a Room (1969)”

A take on it from 2010 but with YouTube compression: [VIDEO] And MKBHD did a take on it in 2019 again with YouTube compression: [LINK]

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