video decoding

An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

Technology Connections shows a cheap method for capturing analog video: a composite-to-HDMI upscaler feeding an HDMI capture dongle, aimed at digitizing home movies and VHS tapes.

The official music video for Kylie Minogue's Come Into My World, directed by Michel Gondry, built around a looping scene with multiplying copies of Kylie.

OK Go's music video for Needing/Getting, shot in the desert with a Chevy Sonic fitted with pneumatic arms that play over a thousand instruments across two miles.

OK Go's music video for The One Moment, in collaboration with Morton Salt. It is a choreographed real-time scene that took about 4.2 seconds to film and is shown slowed down to the length of the song.

The official music video for A$AP Mob's Yamborghini High featuring Juicy J, known for heavy datamoshing and glitch effects with hue shifting.

carykh demonstrates a script that speeds up the silent parts of a video while leaving speech at normal speed, to condense lectures and similar footage. It later became the Jumpcutter tool.

The official music video for Miley Cyrus's song Wrecking Ball. It is a mainstream pop video that became hugely popular on YouTube.

The video accompanying the SIGGRAPH 2012 paper on Eulerian Video Magnification. It amplifies subtle changes in ordinary video, such as skin color shifts from a heartbeat, to reveal pulse and tiny motions.

A BuzzFeed PSA from 2018 in which a deepfaked Barack Obama, voiced by Jordan Peele, warns about fake video before revealing the trick. It is a one-minute demonstration of AI face and voice manipulation.

Ben Eater explains how VGA signals work and builds a breadboard circuit that produces correct sync timing so a monitor recognizes the signal. He then builds toward displaying an image from simple logic chips.

Ben Eater finishes building a minimal VGA video card from logic circuits. He explains analog RGB signals, stores an image in an EEPROM and builds a simple digital-to-analog converter to display it.

Technology Connections gives a deeply researched history of RCA's CED video disc system, a capacitance-based format that took over a decade to reach market. Part one covers its development and strange technology.

The official music video for Insane Clown Posse's song Miracles, from the album Bang Pow Boom.

The official video for Carpenter Brut's Turbo Killer, directed by Seth Ickerman, with psychedelic 1980s-styled visuals set to rock-leaning synthwave.

The official remastered 4K video for a-ha's 1985 hit, famous for its rotoscoped pencil-sketch animation blending live action and comic-book drawings. It won six MTV Video Music Awards in 1986.

OK Go's music video for This Too Shall Pass, featuring a huge Rube Goldberg machine built in a warehouse in Los Angeles with Syyn Labs. The band interacts with the contraption in one continuous take.

Salman Khan explains why he created Khan Academy, a structured library of video lessons with interactive exercises. He calls on teachers to flip the classroom, with lectures watched at home and homework done in class with teacher help.

Weird Al Yankovic's 2014 parody of 'Blurred Lines' that scolds common grammar and usage errors, with a kinetic typography video. It is a catchy music video about language mistakes.

MIT researchers show that sound can be recovered from silent video by analyzing tiny vibrations in objects such as a potato chip bag. It works even with consumer cameras by using rolling shutter.

A short Bookeen R&D demo showing smooth H.264 video playback on a Pearl E Ink panel, driven by a TI OMAP3621 chip and custom controller software.

A BBC News segment on University of Washington research that synthesized a photorealistic Obama video, modeling mouth movement so any audio can be put in his mouth.

The CVPR 2016 oral demo of Face2Face, a system that captures a person's face and reenacts another video's face in real time using only RGB video. The authors frame it as research on modern vision and graphics.

OK Go's music video for Upside Down & Inside Out, filmed during parabolic flights so the band and performers are weightless in the plane.

A playful music video promoting the book Land of Lisp, with a song about Lisp programming.

Who Killed Captain Alex is Uganda's first action movie, made for under $200 by Nabwana IGG in Wakaliga. This version has English subtitles and a video joker (VJ Emmie) providing running commentary.

A 69-minute documentary on the Polybius arcade-game legend. It examines visual, physical and anecdotal evidence, traces the story's source, and concludes the game never existed beyond one website entry.

A Jimquisition episode examining the human cost of predatory videogame monetization, focusing on loot boxes and microtransactions. It features testimonials from people harmed by gambling-style game mechanics.

Folding Ideas examines weird, algorithm-gamed children's content on YouTube, from automated toddler videos and educational spam to exploitative prank channels. It looks at how autoplay and recommendation systems reward this material.

LGR looks at the 1988 Canon Xap Shot, a still video camera that records photos to a floppy disk as analog NTSC signal rather than digital data.

The official music video for Macklemore & Ryan Lewis's Thrift Shop featuring Wanz, a hip hop hit celebrating secondhand shopping.

The official music video for Autechre's 'Gantz Graf', a dense, glitchy electronic track paired with abstract animated 3D visuals reportedly made by hand in 2002.

Tom Scott explains YouTube's 11-character video IDs, which are base-64 encoded 64-bit numbers, and whether YouTube could ever run out of them. It covers counting systems and base 64 briefly.

A travel video of Peru shot natively in 8K HDR at 60fps on a Red Helium sensor. It covers Lima, the Amazon, Cusco and other places.

The official music video for Tommy Tutone's 1981 hit 867-5309/Jenny. The chorus is built around a phone number.

The official 1986 music video for Paranoimia by Art of Noise featuring the computer-generated TV personality Max Headroom. It is a synth-pop and sampling-era piece of 80s pop culture.

A five-minute 4K 60fps HDR travel montage of Costa Rica by the Mystery Box video team. It is a remastered version of their popular scenic footage.

Leaked internal Google X video, 'The Selfish Ledger', a speculative thought experiment about treating user data as a ledger that could guide and shape human behavior, including products sold to fill data gaps.

The official music video for Rammstein's 2004 song Amerika, a satirical take on American cultural dominance and its export around the world. It was shot in the ruins of a former chemical site near Berlin.