Because it’s Friday: Stochastic degradation

June 4, 2010
By

(This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

When you upload a video to YouTube, they don't store a perfect digital copy of your media file. The video is actually re-encoded into the MPEG-4 video format. This saves space on YouTube's servers, but also introduces some random degradation to the video (as a result of the lossy compression process).

So what happens if you then save that converted video, and upload it to YouTube again? The video (and audio) is degraded a little bit more. And what if you repeat that process 750 times? Here's the result:

Althouse:  I was thinking that the problem of making a copy of a copy of a copy had become a thing of the past because of digital files.

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on his blog: Revolutions.
R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials on topics such as: visualization (ggplot2, Boxplots, maps, animation), programming (RStudio, Sweave, LaTeX, SQL, Eclipse, git, hadoop, Web Scraping) statistics (regression, PCA, time series,ecdf, trading) and more...

If you got this far, why not subscribe for updates from the site? Choose your flavor: e-mail, twitter, RSS, or facebook...

Tags:

Comments are closed.

Top 7 articles of the week

  1. Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS?
  2. The Guerilla Guide to R
  3. SAS, SPSS, Stata Users: Learn R from Home June 17
  4. Google Analytics + R = FUN!
  5. Select operations on R data frames
  6. A Shiny web app to find out how much medical procedures cost in your state.
  7. Animations Understood

Sponsors

Mango solutions
mango-solutions.com
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R
Quantide: statistical consulting and training
RStudio homepage
RStudio: a free and open source IDE for R
REvolution analytics
HMS Analytical Software GmbH
http://www.eoda.de
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R. Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).