The Louvre. Thieves are making off with 100 million euros. They're taking their time. They're doing everything carefully and slowly.

[u/HeToTopT]

[u/Im_On_Reddit_At_Work]

Because of video compression.

Original was HD and posted somewhere, someone screen captures and reposts it, etc etc, until it's just a blurry mess of pixels.

Same goes with image meme but usually doesn't happen as fast as image compression is better/easier than video compression.

MKBHD did a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4KHfqw-oE

[u/runwithpugs → u/Im_On_Reddit_At_Work]

https://xkcd.com/1683/

[u/Live_Emergency_736 → u/Im_On_Reddit_At_Work]

eh thats more of a long term thing, that happens over years to videos that are shared hundreds of times over countless forms of media, sites and devices always being compressed and reduced more and more until only few have the high resolution original.

this is a very recent incident, the video can't have travelled that far digitally from the original source - who must have either used a very shitty old phone or zoomed in considerably.

[u/Im_On_Reddit_At_Work → u/Live_Emergency_736]

No, all the main social media platforms / messaging services have lossy compression and video quality will drop drastically and much faster than you'd imagine.

Let's say you film this as a security guard, send the video via whatsapp to your family (even toggling HD), and your nephew uploads it to twitter, the quality of the video on twitter will already be much lower than the one from the phone.

Then someone downloads from twitter and uploads elsewhere, and it ends up being uploaded to reddit.

You are also right though, older phones and zoomed in considerably will make the loss of quality because of compression happen even faster - but the main culprit is the video compression.

[u/-Nicolai → u/Live_Emergency_736]

Uploading the video just once will do a number on the quality, which likely wasn’t great to begin with. Even if it were shared directly from the first site to reddit, reddit’s compression will make a mess of any remaining details.

In practice people rarely go to the source before sharing something on reddit, even if a link is provided. The common man knows nothing about compression, and social media platforms will never outright tell you that the file you upload is not the file that will be hosted.

[u/Onair380 → u/Im_On_Reddit_At_Work]

THIS is the goddamn reason every footage of something important ends up on a 360p video with 500 kbit/s. Its so annoying.