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> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. They're not, though. Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of ye
by VHRanger 4y ago
> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well.
They're not, though.
Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of years, with new "better" lossy compression algorithms. And each time the videos get successively worse.
Watching a 2008 Youtube video will not only look grainy because it's 360p, but it'll look actively *worse* than it did in 2008 because of all the lossy compression that was applied to it over the decades.
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoYouTube has definitely kept the original videos for as long as I can remember, so any transcodes you see are only one generation after the original (plus maybe one more for if they didn't launch with this feature) And yes the new codecs really are better. Same quality at lower bitrate.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI know the norm when I read an article more than a year or two old that has tons of YouTube embeds is for most or all of them to show a "video gone" error. Sometimes even ones that are weeks old are like that. It seems to be at least as bad as the rest of the web as far as data/link rot goes.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoAs a sibling comment noted, I'm pretty sure Youtube keeps the original video files, so generational loss should not be a huge problem. The problem is that Youtube is bitstarving 240p and 360p streams. That makes sense when a video is available at a higher resolution, and the 240p version is for people stuck on dial up or whatever. But in cases where 240p is the highest resolution available, Youtube should provide a high quality 240p stream!