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Why is youtube corrupting old Videos (like the WAN archive)

Wyzzy Moon
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I've noticed (and I don't seem to be the only one) that a lot of old WAN show videos on youtube look horible now, when they didn't used to look like that.
Artifacts all over the place, frames not refreshing and so on.
Like these:

Capture.thumb.PNG.bed00a18ac73e2b9b3e3254295b6f669.PNG
 

Capture2.thumb.PNG.e23e4ec8ee606ebe62915af9ae687402.PNG

 

I know for a fact that I have watched these archives in the past and there was nothing wrong. The "792p" watchdog and inside joke stream was kind of iconic (the origin for "just a number").

Does anyone have an idea why this would be happening.
Also kind of worrying that youtube can corrupt old videos already uploaded to the platform.
Does it maybe have something to do with the fact that these were once livestreams?

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Maybe they were re-encoded at one point serverside? Idk, that does look quite horrible.

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Hmm interesting, even streaming the video file through VLC shows those artifacts throughout the video, it's completely unwatchable and butchered, so it must be an encoding issue and not a player issue, and if Youtube doesn't have uncorrupted backups of those videos then who knows how many videos they have wrecked..

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Holy carp!  I've noticed that, too.  Probably compressing old content to save on space.  Bet it makes people real glad to upload 4k versions of their stuff when YouTube just bit crushes it into a singularity.  

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3 minutes ago, .Apex. said:

Hmm interesting, even streaming the video file through VLC shows those artifacts throughout the video, it's completely unwatchable and butchered, so it must be an encoding issue and not a player issue, and if Youtube doesn't have uncorrupted backups of those videos then who knows how many videos they have wrecked..

Yep noticed that to. It's been skrewed up like this for years, I just never came around to posting it here. But for the first few years after upload they were fine.
And it's happed to almost all of the wan show archive. But not to any other videos...

 

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Just now, Rybo said:

Holy carp!  I've noticed that, too.  Probably compressing old content to save on space.  Bet it makes people real glad to upload 4k versions of their stuff when YouTube just bit crushes it into a singularity.  

If they are compressing old content I would have expected more of a controversy... 

I make Rainmeter things and other art :D

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Just now, Wyzzy Moon said:

If they are compressing old content I would have expected more of a controversy... 

Creators probably don't really realize it.  I know half of the controversies YouTube creates for itself are when it does crap without telling people.  

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2 minutes ago, Wyzzy Moon said:

Yep noticed that to. It's been skrewed up like this for years, I just never came around to posting it here. But for the first few years after upload they were fine.
And it's happed to almost all of the wan show archive. But not to any other videos...

 

Something I've noticed with the two videos you've posted is that they start with a frozen Wanshow Intro for a minutes which Youtube might use that as an indication of frame rate, bitrate or determine color range to try and optimize it to the lowest video size possible? because the Wanshow Intro looks completely fine, it's only when it switches the camera feed that it looks horrible

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1 minute ago, .Apex. said:

Something I've noticed with the two videos you've posted is that they start with a frozen Wanshow Intro for a minutes which Youtube might use that as an indication of frame rate, bitrate or determine color range to try and optimize it to the lowest video size possible? because the Wanshow Intro looks completely fine, it's only when it switches the camera feed that it looks horrible

 

Nevermind, this video starts normally and it still looks awful, I have no clue what Youtube has done

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2 minutes ago, .Apex. said:

 

Nevermind, this video starts normally and it still looks awful, I have no clue what Youtube has done

Correct, but you're right... it is strange that the intro is fine...

I make Rainmeter things and other art :D

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1 minute ago, Wyzzy Moon said:

Correct, but you're right... it is strange that the intro is fine...

I've watched it more closely and I think it's due to the compression algorithm not recognizing any easily determined objects to compress so that's why the Wanshow intro remained intact, if you look at their faces the artifacts seem to follow their facial expressions pretty accurately which is unusual for a supposedly "random corruption", so they must be using AI to detect backgrounds and faces to squeeze out every last byte and they must have used the wrong compression algorithm settings or some sorts

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The even more interesting thing about it is you can go and watch pretty much any "normal" LTT video from the same time and they look more or less fine. I guess its something to do with how the WAN show was recorded, combined with what I would guess is YouTube more heavily compressing older, less viewed videos. 

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Looks like a lot of keyframes are missing (as if they are all dropped) or something, that's super weird.

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17 minutes ago, .Apex. said:

the artifacts seem to follow their facial expressions pretty accurately which is unusual for a supposedly "random corruption", so they must be using AI to detect backgrounds and faces

I don't think there's much AI involved. Interframe video compressors attempt to store data about changes in the image to cut down the actual amount of frames needed. Because the compressor registers changes, it mainly registers moving objects. Those moving objects are in this case their faces. Looking at the footage may suggest something is detecting their faces, but I suspect it's just because their faces are one of the few things moving about.

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@8-Bit Ninja
Remember this back in the day when they only streamed to Twitch (if I remember correctly) and uploaded the local recording later as a VOD. So it's not even youtube archiving a livestream like nowadays. So there shouldn't be any difference compared to a normal video. Only the length.

So for comparison we should find a 1 hour+ video, from about 7 years ago, and see if the interframe compression is also f-ed.

I wonder if youtube can still restore this without a reupload. Are the sourcefiles damaged? or just the version that is served...

I make Rainmeter things and other art :D

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Has anyone else noticed that the picture appears to be significantly less f***ed up in the preview when you roll the mouse over the progress bar?

Maybe this could shed some light on what's going on here.

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3 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Has anyone else noticed that the picture appears to be significantly less f***ed up in the preview when you roll the mouse over the progress bar?

Maybe this could shed some light on what's going on here.

Yep, progress bar is fine, but sometimes not loading at all.
Audio is sometimes worst too.

 

I make Rainmeter things and other art :D

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I've been going trough the WAN show archive an noticed:
- It only seems to affect WAN show's from 2013 and 2014
- It's not consistent AT ALL, some are fine, than a few terrible in a row and then some fine again...
- The oldest one with problems seems to be this: (can we blame @ColdSC? )

^ this one get worst in phases and builds up till it restores to get worst again
- The WAN show archive playlist on youtube only goes back as far as july 2013... but the wan show is older

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17 minutes ago, Wyzzy Moon said:

Yep, progress bar is fine

It's possible that the keyframes are fine and the progress bar may only display keyframes.

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32 minutes ago, Wyzzy Moon said:

So for comparison we should find a 1 hour+ video, from about 7 years ago, and see if the interframe compression is also f-ed.

Ah, here you go, pre-wan show:

 

 

It seems to be mostly fine? I didn't watch a lot of it, saw some minor artifacts but not too bad I think.

 

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4 minutes ago, akio123008 said:

Ah, here you go, pre-wan show:

 

 

It seems to be mostly fine? I didn't watch a lot of it, saw some minor artifacts but not too bad I think.

 

Yep noticed that too. Garage-periode seems mostly fine. It must have something to do with the compression.
All the WAN shows with bright boxes in the background are worst!
 

I make Rainmeter things and other art :D

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Really weird, obviously not intentional.

YouTube probably did some changes to older videos (change codec to a newer one that takes less space maybe?)  And then did some tests, but only tested it on shorter videos.

 

I suspect it only happens on shorter videos, you say some of the ones in that time period is fine, are there any link between them being fine and length?

 

Also, anyone knows about some other more lengthy videos from that time period that can be checked out?

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I remember seeing this corruption in a video from like 10+ years ago, less than 5 mins; at one point the whole image became corrupted, but audio was fine, as far as I can recall. Someone mentioned this in the comments, so I know it didn't affect only me.

🙂

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