Site icon R-bloggers

Because it’s Friday: Stochastic degradation

David Smith

[This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

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:

< embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="385" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/HNxwXI0REtM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450">

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 their blog: Revolutions.
R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.