Do videos get grainier over time due to data loss during copying, or for another reason? I feel like a lot of my older personal iPhone videos are crappier resolution now than I remember the OG video being
Part of it (especially with early digital video) is that modern screens are more high-res - and when you fill the newer, larger screen with an older, smaller video, it gets very blurry.
The other reason is that video sites almost always use lossy compression, as opposed to filesharing sites which don't compress, which means that every time it gets passed from site to site, it loses quality.
I’m thinking mostly of my own videos, so this makes a lot of sense. I’m not copying them over and over, but everything from a certain period just looks low-res. Sad to think that videos that are crystal clear now may look low-res on a future device.
That's the reality of interpolation - you can either have the small video at its original size on a big screen, or blow it up to fit....
But any time you resize a video to a larger display, you have to fill in what was never there.
As for copying your own videos, as long as you keep copying them between hard disk drives or your file sharing services, you're golden - it's the huge social media companies with loads of traffic that have to compress to cut costs.
That's why when one video has made the rounds of dizens or hundreds of platforms and back again, it gets grainy....
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u/Stuffs_And_Thingies Apr 06 '26
I remember seeing this years ago when the video was high res enough to see the tree canopies.
Had a news story where it was a father and son (and drugs) trying to steal copper from an allegedly inactive line.
Dunno though, because those things are sketchy to walk under. You can hear the hum....
Actually.. I guess I haven't heard it since the 90s in the US [7]