On a technical note, my god that compression artifact... is this old? recent? Because it's almost unwatchable... even free p0rn videos had less compression artifacts than this.

Thanks for the reply and sharing your expertise -- sounds like you'd confirm everything that the video said.

This probably just displays my ignorance more, but specifically with regards to the MP3 format, do you think it adds any noticeable compression artifacts even at high-quality settings? Part of my problem was that I was thinking of MP3 *bit*rate as sampling rate (128 kbit/s = 128 kHz, which is not at all correct). But still, MP3 is a lossy format (obviously since one can turn a 650M CD into ~60M of 128k MP3s, or still a large filesize savings even for 320k) and even my relatively untrained ear can sometimes hear the difference at low (say, 128k or lower) bitrates.

I guess that a music producer wouldn't record/master anything in a compressed format like MP3, so that is sort of entirely separate from the point of this video and your comment. But just out of curiosity, do you think that people can detect differences between a 16 bit 44 kHz uncompressed digital recording (flac maybe?) and a very high quality MP3 (say, 320 kbit)?

This goes beyond my knowledge level of signals and waveforms, but it was very interesting anyway.

That being said, OK, I'm sold on the concept that ADC and back doesn't screw up the signal. However, I'm pretty sure that real audiophiles could easily listen to several copies of the same recording at different bitrates and frequencies and correctly identify which ones are higher or better quality with excellent accuracy. I bet that is true even for 16bit vs 24bit, or 192kHz vs 320kHz -- stuff that should be "so good it is impossible to tell the difference".

Since some people that train themselves to have an ear for it CAN detect differences (accurately), the differences must actually be there. If they aren't artifacts of ADC issues, then what are they? I'm guessing compression artifacts?

In a visual version of this, I remember watching digital satellite TV around 10-15 years ago. The digital TV signal was fine and clear -- almost certainly better than what you'd get from an analog OTA antenna. BUT, the satellites used (I believe) mpeg compression to reduce channel bandwidth, and that compression created some artifacts that were easy to notice once somebody pointed them out to you. I specifically remember onscreen people getting "jellyface" anytime someone would nod slowly, or make similar periodic motions. I've got a feeling that some of the artifacts that we (or at least those of us that are real hardcore audiophiles) can notice in MP3 audio files are similar to an audio version of that jellyface kind of issue.

Questions:
Why are all the video thumbnails such bad quality?
I'm looking at them and they are fuzzy, blurry and almost look like they have a screen filter on them. It is possible that the thumbnail process is compressing the images too much creating extensive compression artifact but I don't think that's it. To me they all look like what you would get if you filmed your TV screen with a low resolution video camera and then made a JPG out of it. Just plain ol' low quality.

Why are the comment text boxes so small?
Text boxes, like the one I am typing in right now show about six lines of text. I assume it's to give that sleek/slim look to the page and not take up so much vertical real estate on the page. Sometimes slimmer isn't better. I have to constantly stop and scroll up and down just to read my one paragraph as I'm typing to make sure my sentences make sense. Never mind actually trying to see more of what I've written. It's not quite like reading a book through a pin-hole but it does feel awfully claustrophobic. - Oh hold on... There's a corner I can pull and make the text box window larger - nice. You still may or may not want to set the default box size to text lines of text, at least.

Nice video. I'd love to see a higher quality (and maybe higher resolution) version. My eyes ache from the YouTube compression artifacts in this one. YouTube (as most video compression) does not handle nebulosity very well.

upvote for the quality compression artifacts.
... don't make 'em like they used to.

Holy compression artifacts, Batman. That one has much better quality, especially audio.
Btw, there's also a completely different video to this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmYT79tPvLg

War would be a lot more fun if it wasn't for all the getting wounded, dying and compression artifacts.

Wow. Film projection artifacts. VHS tracking artifacts. YouTube compression artifacts. What a quality video!

It's a neat idea but it doesn't quite seem feasible to me. There are some big issues-
It's computationally and thus $$$ expensive to render all of that stuff.
It's expensive to pay for all the bandwidth, especially if you want it to be high-definition. At best a player will have to live with low-res graphics and compression artifacts.
And the biggest show-stopper is the latency. You can't have any form of client side prediction which hides latency in online games. Your latency is increased by having to go through a video compression step. Best case I imagine 1 second of latency and that just isn't fun to play with.

Online games just don't seem like a good application for thin-clients. It's so much faster and cheaper to send a compact description of the world state instead of sending an entire visualization. Mobile phones could be an exception, since they are low-res and have limited graphics acceleration, but they also have limited and expensive network bandwidth.

No problem. It's a shame there's no ultra-high res version without the crummy compression artifacts (only visible if you go full-screen, but still).

...if someone finds something better, please post here.

Needs more compression artifacts.

It's hard to tell due to compression artifacts, but that sheet music looks hand-written, as in he arranged the piece himself. Nice work!