[esotericsean]

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! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0

[bringtheaction]

Here’s another one up the same alley that is interesting to watch: VHS generation loss.

> What happens if you make a copy of a copy of a copy (and so on) of a VHS tape? This experiment shows how the quality degrades with every generation.

> The copying was done using two PAL VCRs in SP mode.

> (The video is Fading like a flower by Roxette)

https://youtu.be/mES3CHEnVyI

[_qxjp]

Thanks for the link!

This may sound crazy, but I wonder if there's a way to "automate" this deconstruction with ffmpeg...

[_qxjp]

Update: here's a one-liner that will do exactly that

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -strict -2 -crf 51 output.mp4 && rm input.mp4 && mv output.mp4 input.mp4

For better results, run the above command ten times:

for ((n=0;n<10;n++)); do ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -strict -2 -crf 51 output.mp4 && rm input.mp4 && mv output.mp4 input.mp4; done

[rothron]

Theoretically, it should be possible to recompress the video back into the compressed file with no loss, provided the same codec is used, but it would be far more expensive computationally.

[pbhjpbhj]

Aren't most image/video compression algorithms lossy? There would surely be more than one possible "decompression".