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Guy uploads, downloads, then re-uploads the same video to YouTube 1,000 times
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- dangrossman 16y agoWas 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 16y agoThe benefit is that all 1000 videos are available on YouTube - you can check out the quality at any step along the way.
- ZeroGravitas 16y agoMaybe 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 16y agoDespite what you might think, the majority of the planet has no clue what a shell script is.
- dschobel 16y agoSavages.
- eru 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
- mscarborough 16y agoGood point, but it's possible that he enjoyed the process somewhat. Recording 'I am sitting in a room' probably became a little tedious for Lucier as well, in all the time he spent from conceptualization until completion. And even if he did not enjoy it at all, patio11 makes another good point about it being a better background story for the piece.
- eru 16y agoYes, you are probably right. My comment was aimed at the snobbery over the unwashed masses.
- jazzychad 16y agoPerhaps, 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 16y agoThe 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.
- megablast 16y agoNobody is blaming youtube, video compression or anything of the such. This is to expected behaviour. And no normal person should be able to expect, or want to upload and download a video 1000 times, or even more than 10.
- jokermatt999 16y agoHe does say "and the mp4 codec" in his speech, so that's acknowledged at least.
- kno 16y agoThere are clear reasons why not everyone is an artist, patience and endurance is are a huge part of it.
- ars 16y agoThat's also the same reason many people look down on (modern) artists. The use patience to do something everyone else would do in a more efficient way.
- deleted 16y ago
- eli 16y agoSometimes the artistic process is just as important as the final product.
- patio11 16y agoA 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.)
- exit 16y agoi think products targeted at low income demographics are very much sold with a story. a kind of utilitarian "sensibleness" which facilitates contempt for more expensive products. why would advertisers neglect to exploit human psychology at all socioeconomic levels?
- GFischer 16y agoI believe you're right... a hugely successful ad for the Tang powdered drink in South America showed a spoilt rich kid asking his butler for Tang after they were stranded with no oranges in sight. (One of the messages I take from the ad was that the rich kid was missing on what the butler knew all along)
- dschobel 16y agoOf course it is universal; what is advertising but giving products a compelling narrative?
- cdr 16y agoNo, I'm pretty tomatoes are just sold as tomatoes. Produce is produce until you're trying to justify charging a multiplier of the base price.
- 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- alexyim 16y agoAre you just making the blind assumption that he's a programmer?
- Tichy 16y agoOne 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...
- xenophanes 16y agoI agree, but... One day for 1000 iterations means 86.4 seconds to upload to youtube, wait for encoding to finish, then download it. Youtube is slower than that. :-) Better give it a week. Maybe a month.
- pjscott 16y agoHe could work on something else during that month. Automation!
- xenophanes 16y agoYes of course, but he can't take 364 days to learn to program.
- amalcon 16y agoOr one (maybe a few, I don't know what the going rate for something like this) day working for minimum wage, a few hours to find a freelance programmer, and paying the programmer to write the upload script. Then, spend ~360 days doing whatever. Something tells me this project was not about efficiency.
- mos1b 16y agoI make maple syrup by hand. It requires a huge amount of physical labor, as well as a fairly expensive evaporator and as well as a small building devoted to that single purpose. The product tastes the same as the stuff I can buy from my neighbor's maple stand for a fraction of the cost and effort. It's wholly irrational. And I'll do it again next year. Sometimes the joy comes from doing it the hard way.
- sohooo 16y agoYeah, I immediately thought of this t-shirt when reading your comment :) http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/frustrations/374d/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/frustrations...
- orlandu63 16y agoYes 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.)
- FlorinAndrei 16y agoI'm pretty sure they use (perhaps a custom version of) x264 to encode video.
- FlorinAndrei 16y agoBecause "YouTube" has a meaning for regular people, while "x264" doesn't.
- kierank 16y agoA lot of people I speak to associate x264 with pirated film downloads.
- nerme 16y agoThere 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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- MikeCapone 16y 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.
- ddemchuk 16y agoI'm sure Youtube loved getting spammed with a 1000 very similar videos
- matthew-wegner 16y agoProbably not as much as they loved an interesting story about YouTube on prominent websites.
- ddemchuk 16y agocome on now, it's youtube, they're the second most used search engine in the world. They don't really need good press anymore
- daten 16y agoIn that same year, how many much less interesting videos do you think were uploaded? I doubt they noticed.
- slackito 16y agoThe process reminds me of this post: http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/355-How-I-Met-Your-Mother-Through-Photoshop.html http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/355-How-I-M...
- jpablo 16y agoGreat post, I wonder if the trick that photoshop is pulling is really beneficial or worse in the long term.
- chaosmachine 16y agoThe "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/ http://www.cinemassacre.com/2010/05/26/vhs-generation-loss/
- igravious 16y agoso: prior art?!
- studer 16y agoIt's his take on Alvin Lucier's famous "I Am Sitting in a Room": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfssj80oNuM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfssj80oNuM The original recording is linked from the Mashable article.
- nitrogen 16y agoAs 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 16y agoI'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 16y agoTime: yes File size: yes Not sure why the time dropped.
- faboo 16y agoI'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.
- ars 16y agoHe 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 16y agoSometimes 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.
- mmaunder 16y agoWhat's the difference between an artist and a Perl programmer? 364 days and 23 hours.
- jrockway 16y agoAnd the Perl programmer has disposable income and a girlfriend.
- fuzzmeister 16y agoWell, let's not go overboard here...
- nandemo 16y agoWait, in what part of the world is a programmer more likely than an artist to have a girlfriend?
- jrockway 16y agoOnes where girls like the guy to buy them food?
- TotlolRon 16y agoThe artist hit the front page.
- gloob 16y agoSo did a rumour about .NET code running on the iPhone.
- eavc 16y agoI get and appreciate that joke, but there sure is a smug sense of superiority from the programmers in this thread.
- mmaunder 16y agoYou should see the shit us Perl programmers take from the Ruby guys.
- idoh 16y agoI 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 16y agoWhich is pathetic, since it's possible to do a lossless (I mean not incrementally lossy) rotation of JPG's.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoMS 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 16y agoHe probably could have saved a lot of time with a shell script :)
- bitwize 16y agoI bet Christopher (prawn protagonist of District 9) might be able to grok the bizarre utterances in the 1000th video... but I can't.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoI'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 16y ago> codec/decode I think that you meant: 'code/decode.' 'codec' is a abbreviation for 'code/decode.'
- yanowitz 16y agoDoes 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 16y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1402382 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.
- daten 16y agoAnd 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.
- ars 16y agoI 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.
- celoyd 16y agore-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 16y agoWhy 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.
- ars 16y agoSo I tried it. The biggest problem is that it gets quieter each pass. Not sure why. I tried adding --noreplaygain but it didn't help. The quality seemed to preserve OK, but as the signal get quieter and quieter the noise started becoming more obvious.
- bg4 16y agoNow he needs to splice them all into a single video showing the gradual degradation over time.
- ecq 16y agothis guy has a lot of time in his hands.
- presidentender 16y agoThe 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoI wasn't familiar with the audio piece that inspired this so I downloaded the mp3 from http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html 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.
- jsz0 16y agoNext 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.
- mos1b 16y agoHe used hundreds of hours of his time. What makes you think he would've refrained from paying a few extra dollars for the bandwidth?
- jsz0 16y agoNothing. 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 16y agoHere's the inspiration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
- Vivtek 16y agoWhat'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 16y agoMy speakers were on full blast - the 1,000th uploaded one scared the crap out of me! :O
- gills 16y agoWow. It's like a lesson in wavelet transforms for the layman. But without ever using the word 'wavelet.' Cool.
- stellar678 16y agoIt'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.