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VIDEO ROOM 1000 COMPLETE MIX -- All 1000 videos seen in sequential order!

ontologist · 2.4M views · 2010-06-09 · 2:51

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Overview

A condensed rendition of a project that re-uploaded one video to YouTube 1000 times, showing the accumulating compression artifacts. It pays homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.

On Hacker News

Cited as a vivid demonstration of generation loss from repeated lossy re-encoding.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2018–2023

Topics

Information theory & signal processingAudio & video engineeringCreative coding & generative art
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compressionvideo codecsalvin lucierdegradationart project

What people said

fnands · 2023-11 · Reference

A take on it from 2010 but with YouTube compression: [VIDEO] And MKBHD did a take on it in 2019 again with YouTube compression: [LINK]

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vel0city · 2023-03 · Reference

You're not understanding how lossy compression encoders work. Try recompressing a JPEG a few dozen times. Or take an MP3 and export it from Audacity, open the export, export as MP3 again a dozen times and see what it sounds like. All those artifacts keep getting amplified every time you re-encode until it's practically just the artifacts. Every time you render and recompress you're losing information, it's lossy compression after all. [VIDEO]

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TonyTrapp · 2022-11 · Reference

The experiment has also been brought to the 21st century and its video and audio codecs: [VIDEO] - uploading a video 1000 times to YouTube.

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Sources

Video by ontologist, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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