Strange sqirming backgrounds and cam motions on streaming vids from the net

[sonnybeach]

Lately I've been seeing strange things going on with streaming movies and clips that I'm seeing on the internet. The background is moving and twisting and turning, while the foreground stays fixed. There are also numerous zooms and pans that are obviously not the work of the director. Sometimes it gets so annoying and intrusive that it almost makes me queasy. These motions are so clumsy and frequent that I have to believe they are being done automatically by software. No human technician would be so ham-handed.

There are a number of examples that I'll start collecting. Here's one I was watching when I decided to write this comment/question.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNapIoKGsuI

It's a two minute clip from youtube. I've also seen the same thing when watching non-youtube streaming vids (JustinTV) and also see it when I downloaded a movie from clips on youtube so it's not just the server-side javascript.

I've been watching streaming vids for five years now and just this last month is the first time I've seen this kind of annoying artifact.

So what is going on here? Is this the future of video streaming? The more codecs change the worse they get? If so then a lot of really good movies are going to be ruined, so I hope this is a temporary problem.

Sonnybeach in Oregon

[Krispy Kritter]

The result of compression. It's not new or related to new codecs.

[sanlyn]

The link is to typical ultra-low stingy miserly low-bitrate + sledgehammer processing = multimedia detritus. Add the typical low-quality media players on similar sites, and add that a lot of this stuff is made for use on portable devices with a screen the size of your wrist watch, and you have what many on the web speak of as "quality". Times have certainly changed since I first heard that term used in the same sentence with video or audio.

[sonnybeach]

Thanks for the responses, guys. I didn't remember seeing it before but maybe I just wasn't looking close enough. It's too bad because one of the streaming vids I was watching was completely ruined by this stuff, and it was an old B&W movie (Johnny Danger, or something like that). I've seen that movie before and I don't remember those kind of artifacts, but maybe this was a new rip.

Thanks.

[Bandersnatch]

Sonnybeach, what you're seeing is youtube's image stabilisation.
When someone uploads a video and watches it for the first time it'll often tell you it's detected a wobbly image and that it can fix it. Uploaders should always say no to this as image stabilisation is totally useless when done automatically in this way - as you've seen it totally ruins videos.

For anyone who can't spot it in the video you posted here's a more obvious example. Someones made a video of something being shown on a screen and if you look at the sides of the screen you can see how the borders bend and twist while the image stabilisation is doing it's work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksKpthBP9ic

And if you're seeing this on other sites as well as youtube I'd suggest that it's just a case of the video being downloaded from youtube and uploaded to the other site.

[sonnybeach]

thanks Bandersnatch. that's the best explanation I've seen and it would explain why I'm also seeing the problem on vid streaming sites like Justin tv. Either the vidcaster has downloaded from youtube, or he's just directly streaming from youtube using a link.

It's a cryin' shame though, what it does to some old, classic movies. Thanks for the info.