Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Is What Happens When You Re-Upload a YouTube Video 1000 Times!”.
What’S up guys mkbhd here and one of my favorite things about making videos with this high-end gear is the images that these cameras can capture is legit, absolutely incredible behind the scenes? What you might not know is the actual video file that i’m uploading to youtube looks significantly better on my computer than on youtube like it looks pretty good on youtube and you can watch in 4k and it looks pretty crispy and sharp, and but it looks miles Better when i’m looking at it in quicktime on my computer after i’ve exported it to the point where sometimes i’m like. Why do i spend so much time on like the little things, just little color adjustments, little tiny, sharpening and stabilization, and things like that when, at the end of the day, you’re just going to watch it on your phone or on some laptop and not really notice? 99 of that stuff – and it’s of course, because that process is so fun, but it’s also become kind of a running joke that like if you want to shoot at a crazy high iso or if you have a ton of noise, you don’t really need a denoiser, Because youtube processing will just clean up all that noise for you, it’ll, just soften it up anyway. All this is because youtube has to compress the file we upload. So, in order to process all the millions of hours of video being uploaded to the site every month and process them into a 4k version and a 1440p version, a 1080 a 720 a 480 all these versions and dynamically switch between them. All they’ve got to do some smart, streamlining and part of that is crunching down the video files to as small as they reasonably can.
So if i upload this video, for example, this beautiful crispy, probably five gigabyte or so final file, when it’s all done and rendered out youtube, isn’t turning around and playing back that five gigabyte monstrous file to you. Your internet’s, not good enough to do that. In the first place, what they’ve correctly assumed is that they can compress it all the way down to just a few megabytes and it’ll look pretty much just as good and it’ll speed things up significantly. So that being said, i’ve always been curious.
How serious is this compression? How serious is youtube processing in 2019 and turns out sort of the best way to test that would be to upload a video and then download that video and then check out the difference? But, of course one time’s, not enough. You got to do it, i guess mr b style. Basically at this point, so the plan is upload, a video to youtube. Let it process then download that video then upload that video, let it process download that one upload that download it again and keep going and keep going and keep going until it breaks further and further down and we’ll do that a thousand times.
So this idea this has actually been done before, backed by a channel in 2010 about a decade ago called ontologist, and they did this with a webcam video. But i suspect, with changes in scale and different codecs. Youtube’S processing has evolved a bit since then um, plus they now support hd videos. So here we are at the end of 2019. Let’S see if youtube’s processing has gotten any better or any worse. Let’S see how good it really is in 2019., all right.
So i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself and i’m going to upload it to youtube rip it from youtube and then upload it again and download and upload Again and again, and again until all the original characteristics of my voice and my image are destroyed, this is a test of youtube processing in 2019. Okay, so this is the original file it’s 8k. It’S super sharp super clean white background and you know to me moving around a little bit: uh high quality audio as well, so this is sort of your classic talking head tech, video. This is our base, our starting point, all right, so i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself. So this is file number two, so this is downloaded from youtube’s native downloader. So in the youtube video manager, they give you a download option, and this gives us back a 720p version.
So it’s going to be 720p from here on out which kind of sucks, and i almost sort of wonder what it would have been like if we’d used a third-party one. That would give us a 1080p version or something like that. But those are not as consistent. So just using straight up youtube, downloader and looking at the file. You know, of course, there’s less sharpness, but it generally basically resembles the original file just a 720p version. Nothing too crazy, all right! So i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right.
Now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself all right, so five downloads in it’s getting softer here for sure um and we’re starting to see the effects of not just losing detail, but the compression algorithms at work that are trying To save detail and be efficient, so basically a video compression algorithm we’ll take a look at this entire video it’ll scan the whole thing and essentially divide it into a bunch of smaller blocks or groups of pixels. Then it’ll look through the video frame by frame one by one by one and if a certain block of pixels remains the same through multiple frames. It’Ll know that it doesn’t have to change much. It can keep that original frame through and save some space. This whole process is called block motion estimation, it’s very common with video compression and i’ll link, a really good video below that explains it super well, it’s only got a couple thousand views, but i think it does the best job, but basically the way we notice. This is certain parts of the video that don’t move like the background. For example, they will stay fine, but the parts of the video that do move like me will start to break down a little bit all right. So i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself. So here we go now we’re getting some more dramatic compression.
It’S super soft overall, of course, my face the details. In it, the skin is just super soft, but again the background which was already soft, isn’t losing much detail at all. In fact, it kind of looks the same as the beginning because it isn’t moving from frame to frame they’re, just keeping those old pixels until my arm passes over in front of it or something, then you can kind of see it reset for a couple frames.
Also by now, you’ve probably noticed the audio is a bit different, turns out youtube sort of shifts the audio or cuts back the audio by about two frames with every download and upload which isn’t really enough to notice at first. But now it’s adding up for us to be able to see that difference all right, so i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself. Okay, so we’re now we’re 20 downloads and 20 uploads in and we’ve gotten to the point where you can, you can kind of start to see the blocks or like the bigger chunks of pixels that the compression algorithm is sort of holding together. It’S kind of like a math problem like if you just start rounding 15 555, which is a pretty precise measurement.
If you start rounding that digit by digit over and over and over again, eventually, you just get 20 000, which does that make sense. But what’s funny, is you still notice? There are still moments when, like i also pause i’ll, stop moving for a couple of frames and it’ll also sharpen up again like that right there at 27 seconds for a second there, there were consecutive frames that i didn’t really change too much, and so it duplicated The pixels and it looked clear for a second and then i move again, and it goes right back into chaos all right. So i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself. Okay, so the audio shift continues this time the audio didn’t start for a full two seconds.
Two and a half seconds into the video and the first instance of what i’ll call brutal blockiness is also what’s happening. It’S grouping like blocks of blocks so like bigger sections of pixels, because they’re sort of close enough in color that they might as well be the same color from frame to frame and also my skin tone, is shifting from brown to more magenta too. If you’ve noticed that, and the pauses where i stop moving for a second are even more dramatic, like the whole video frame kind of resets, so i’ll wave my hand in front of the background in front of the cheerios for a second and it kind of smears. Magenta all over it, but when it gets back to a couple, still frames it all snaps back and the smears disappear, it’s fascinating all right! So i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now, it kind of just looks like now like a struggling graphics card like like someone turned rtx off the audio takes four seconds this time to come in, and you can now actually kind of Hear a little bit of the audio compression start to take effect.
It’S not nearly as drastic as the video, but it kind of sounds like um, like behind a thin cloth, a little little muffled, but not too bad. Oh and my waving arms now are leaving disappearing. Faint magenta trails on my shirt and on the wall behind me all right, so i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself. It’S kind of funny.
The first frame of this one looks like it’s gon na be okay and then it all just goes to chaos. Now i really look like the faceless cartoon avatar that i used to have on here. Uh the details in my skin. Not only has a sharpness gone but, like my eyes, nose and mouth are like almost completely gone too, and the magenta trails are getting even more magenta they’re closer to pink, oh and the sound too. It doesn’t even sound necessarily that much worse, but it’s shifted so far.
Now that the entire last sentence of the video was cut off until all the original characteristics of my voice and my image are destroyed and the pauses are so dramatic now that when it finds consecutive frames that haven’t been destroyed yet like right now, it’s still around 26 seconds, when i go from the faceless character to a human and then slowly descends back into a caricature again, it’s really simplifying the colors here with all the larger blocks of all the rounding going on the background, though, honestly still fine, all right, so i’m sitting In a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself and i’m going to upload it to youtube all right, uh welcome to my personal hell. I don’t think it can get much worse than this. Facial features all the structure, all the contrast, all the detail.
All that is gone. It’S basically turned into pink blocks, and then the best part now is just like how pristine the background still kind of is. It’S very similar to the original upload like, even though my actual caricature has turned into a pink blobbering blob, whatever those those paintings out of focus behind me kind of look very similar to what they first look like when i first downloaded it okay. So this grand finale, it’s got it all. It’S part, art part chaos, parts of it are completely unintelligible, like you can barely tell it’s like just a human being. That’S all you really know about what you’re watching and then the blocks are even bigger.
Look at my hairline like it looks like if you turn the graphics all the way down as low as they could possibly get. Then you might end up with that sort of level of minecraft quality and the audio is completely gone. So it slid from slightly time, delayed to a little bit off to halfway through the video to sliding completely out the other side. So it’s completely empty. There’S no audio in the thousandth upload turns out the 800th video is about the last time. You can hear me say anything compressed over 800 times all right, so i’m sitting in a room yeah, i bet. If we did another thousand downloads, it would look kind of similar to the 1000th one. Also.
I love that it still triggers the hd badge because it is technically still the 720p file, but now that this is done, you can see any or all of the thousand uploads on the channel linked below. So you can see the auto-generated thumbnails get progressively worse. More nightmarish over time and i’ll basically toss in all the important links below to milestone videos, so you can check them out for yourself all right. So i’m sitting in a room different from the one you’re in right now and i’m recording both the sound of my voice and an image of myself and i’m going to upload it to youtube rip it from youtube and then upload it again and download and upload Again and again, and again until all the original characteristics of my voice and my images, so what have we learned from doing all this well number one? I will say i think i have more respect for youtube’s processing and all their compression than i did before. I obviously still think it looks much better on my computer than on youtube, but it looks much better than the 2010 version.
I can say that for sure, but then number two, the audio held up pretty well aside from the whole shifting issue, so the actual quality was pretty decent. It got a little muffled, but it didn’t turn into a puddle, which is i say that, because in the original back in 2010, with that webcam video um have a look. This is his 1000th video that is hilarious.
So i found this all fascinating. Was it a gigantic waste of time no uh? I think someone had to do it so either way. That’S been it. I’M happy to finally share this with you. After our weeks and weeks of uploading and downloading and uh shout out to the original, which was an audio experiment, so i’ll link the info to that below, as well with all the rest of the stuff, it’ll all be below the like button.
If you want to check it out and, of course, feel free to share this video with anyone who might be interested in a high quality, super scientific analysis of youtube processing in 2019, thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace .