Because it's Friday: Stochastic degradation

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.

Comments

[Paul Walters]

The phrase "stochastic degradation" occurred to me in thinking about what happens if I repeatedly split my digital cable signal. I looked it up on Google and your page was the #1 hit.

[David Smith]

I didn't know that -- thanks, Paul!