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

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

Thanks for the link!

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

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

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.

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

Like translating a phrase into a foreign language and back repeatedly, I inagine you’d end up with something fun and impressionistic. I’d like to see it too.

Like this? http://www.translationparty.com/

If you're out of imagination you can copy and paste some comments from here and watch the results.

http://www.translationparty.com/bizarrely-the-pixelated-stuf...

From

> Bizarrely, the pixelated stuff in the images you linked look way better.

To

> But then I remembered I look way better in the morning light.

In one step. Lovely! This sounds like poetry.

I've never heard of this before but just wasted 20 minutes on it. Very interesting concept with hilarious results

Most things I tried were slightly changed from english to japanese just once, then converged. Maybe it's just my lack of imagination!

Most of what I tried gathered somewhat from English to Japanese. Perhaps it is my lack of imagination!

The best examples, those with more divergent results, are those with a lot of subordinate clauses, which get mixed-up and moved from different parts of the sentence. You can select complex sentences from the list below.

> Like translating a phrase into a foreign language and back repeatedly, I inagine you’d end up with something fun and impressionistic.

This exact game features in the plot of Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Galactic Pot-Healer.

For songs there is this: https://www.youtube.com/user/malineka146/videos