[function_seven]

> It's a strange thing to see white-snow-static redigitized and then drop bit-rates.

Old-school white snow static is theoretically the most uncompressable thing, right? So some poor encoder is being told to "send this at 384kb!" and it just throws its little robot hands up and says, "fine, here's your super blocky bullshit. I'm going on break..."

Or something like that?

[zaarn]

Modern codecs detect noise, filter it out and add back artifical noise at the decoder (especially audio codecs can do this with all kinds of noise). I think back in the day, video compression would likely not have an issue as noise is high frequency and if you're compressing images, that's the first thing to go, you'd just get a blurrier image.