video encoding
4:20Why Snow and Confetti Ruin YouTube Video Quality
10.4M views • 10 years ago
Tom Scott
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.
24:46Breakdown of the Pentagon UFO videos with Mick West
366K views • 6 years ago
Cool Worlds
Astronomer David Kipping of Cool Worlds talks with Mick West to break down the three declassified Pentagon UFO videos. They explain the footage through camera artifacts, glare, and perspective effects.
14:20Reveal Invisible Motion With This Clever Video Trick
2.8M views • 6 years ago
Steve Mould
Steve Mould explains motion amplification and video magnification, techniques that find tiny changes in video invisible to the eye and exaggerate them. He covers the MIT research and industrial uses such as diagnosing vibrating machinery.
2:54Explained: New Navy UFO Videos
284K views • 6 years ago
Mick West
Mick West explains the three Navy UFO videos (FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST) released in 2020, giving mundane explanations such as a distant plane and camera artifacts. He notes the videos were not new and had been circulating since 2017.
7:00CD / Color
2.9M views • 6 years ago
Captain Disillusion
Captain Disillusion's comedic, fast-paced explainer on how color works in cameras, displays and video. It covers the biology of color perception and what it means for screens.
12:24The 1988 VIDEO Floppy Disk Camera: Canon Xap Shot RC-250
452K views • 8 years ago
LGR
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.
5:10Will YouTube Ever Run Out Of Video IDs?
10.1M views • 10 years ago
Tom Scott
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.
6:43Explained: "Go Fast" UFO Video - Not Low and Not Fast - Like a Balloon!
156K views • 7 years ago
Mick West
Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.
8:04Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos
1.7M views • 15 years ago
Veritasium
Veritasium examines research suggesting science explainer videos like Khan Academy's make students feel they understand while tests show they have not learned, because misconceptions go unaddressed. It suggests how to partly fix this.
16:29Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--and failed hard (Part 1)
1.5M views • 9 years ago
Technology Connections
Part one of Technology Connections' account of the VHS versus Betamax format war. It argues Sony was caught off guard by JVC's cheaper, more practical VHS system.
5:077 Minutes of Terror: Curiosity Rover's Risky Mars Landing | Video
1.2M views • 14 years ago
VideoFromSpace
NASA's animated explanation of the Curiosity rover's Mars landing, which relied on a complex automated sequence taking about seven minutes. It features NASA engineers discussing the risks before the 2012 landing.
13:09Moon Landings Faked? Filmmaker Says Not!
1.4M views • 13 years ago
VideoFromSpace
A filmmaker explains why the Apollo moon landing footage could not have been faked in a studio, based on the video and film technology of the late 1960s. He walks through the limits of cameras, frame rates and effects of the era.
8:25Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement
10.8M views • 11 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.
30:53I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird
2.1M views • 1 year ago
Benn Jordan
Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.
12:41My Video Got 2 Companies Shut Down! (And even worse negative ion products)
5.6M views • 5 years ago
The Thought Emporium
The Thought Emporium follows up on his earlier video showing negative ion products are radioactive, reporting that Amazon pulled listings and companies shut down. He tests more radioactive quack products with a Geiger counter and cloud chamber.
10:39This Video Has 77,321,815 Views
77.3M views • 6 years ago
Tom Scott
Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.
18:25How Star Wars was saved in the edit
3.2M views • 8 years ago
RocketJump
A video essay on how the editors of Star Wars: A New Hope recut and rearranged the footage to rescue the film. It walks through specific changes that improved pacing and drama.
37:20But how do AI images and videos actually work? | Guest video by Welch Labs
2.2M views • 1 year ago
3Blue1Brown
A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.
9:51Comparing Beta & VHS on Quality: Was Beta Really Better?
710K views • 9 years ago
Technology Connections
Technology Connections compares Betamax and VHS picture quality using footage from a 1979 RCA VCR and argues the Beta quality advantage was largely marketing.
3:38The Shortest-Splitline Algorithm: a Gerrymandering Solution [Bonus Video]
692K views • 15 years ago
CGP Grey
A short CGP Grey bonus video explaining the shortest-splitline algorithm, which draws electoral districts by repeatedly splitting a state along its shortest dividing line while balancing population. It is offered as a neutral, algorithmic fix for gerrymandering.
21:25Gimbal UFO - A New Analysis
208K views • 4 years ago
Mick West
Mick West analyzes the Navy's Gimbal UFO video and gives four checkable observations suggesting it is an infrared glare that appears to rotate because the camera rotates while tracking. He argues the object is likely a hot craft hidden behind the glare.
9:37Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile
2.1M views • 13 years ago
Computerphile
Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.
12:02Nintendo - Putting Play First
997K views • 9 years ago
Game Maker's Toolkit
Game Maker's Toolkit examines Nintendo's design approach of starting from a core play mechanic, making it fun, and building around it. Examples include Mario's jump and Luigi's Mansion's vacuum.
41:35The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie
4.5M views • 7 years ago
Innuendo Studios
A video essay from the Alt-Right Playbook series that explains how extremist movements draw ordinary people in, using deniable rhetoric, bad-faith games, and gradual escalation. It draws on books about the alt-right, male radicalization, and cult-style brainwashing.
9:06Vancouver Never Plays Itself
2.2M views • 11 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
A video essay from Every Frame a Painting about Vancouver, a major film production city that almost never appears onscreen as itself. It shows clips of films and TV shot there that pass the city off as somewhere else.
8:42Michael Bay - What is Bayhem?
3.3M views • 12 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Michael Bay's style, 'Bayhem', covering his camera movement, composition, color and editing. It argues that even if you dislike his films, they teach something about visual perception.
8:00Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy
11.4M views • 12 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
An Every Frame a Painting video essay analysing how Edgar Wright creates visual comedy through framing, camera movement, editing, sound effects and music.
4:30Watching This Video Disqualifies You From Jury Duty for Life
21.2M views • 12 years ago
CGP Grey
CGP Grey explains jury nullification, a juror's power to acquit despite the law, and why mentioning it can get you struck from jury selection.
8:35Buster Keaton - The Art of the Gag
8.4M views • 10 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Buster Keaton's visual comedy, examining how he built and framed his gags. It uses clips from his silent films to show the thinking behind them.
7:37Satoshi Kon - Editing Space & Time
4M views • 12 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
A video essay from Every Frame a Painting on animator Satoshi Kon and his editing style, which distorts and warps space and time. It draws on his four features and one TV series.
4:17AI Learns Noise Filtering For Photorealistic Videos | Two Minute Papers #215
65K views • 8 years ago
Two Minute Papers
A Two Minute Papers episode on NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder, which cleans up noisy Monte Carlo path-traced image sequences. It shows how a neural network can produce usable renders from very few samples.
22:10Why Don't You Want To Do Anything After Binging 4 Hours of YouTube Videos...
2.3M views • 3 years ago
HealthyGamerGG
Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG explains why people feel unmotivated and unable to start tasks after hours of YouTube or similar distractions. He frames it as a result of how social media is designed to capture attention, and says not to blame yourself.
28:28What is PLUS times PLUS?
2.2M views • 1 year ago
2swap
2swap explores lambda calculus using John Tromp's lambda diagrams, with animated beta-reductions, asking what PLUS times PLUS gives. It touches on Church encodings and the equivalence of Turing machines and lambda calculus.
5:06Ion drive: The first flight
2.4M views • 7 years ago
nature video
Nature video showing MIT researchers flying the first plane with no moving parts, powered by an ion drive that creates an ionic wind from high-powered electrodes. The 5m-wide craft flies across a sports hall.
4:11Laniakea: Our home supercluster
8.3M views • 12 years ago
nature video
A short Nature video on the discovery that our home supercluster is Laniakea, redefined by mapping the flow of galaxies rather than their density. It names the structure with a Hawaiian word meaning 'immeasurable heaven'.
1:13:50The Continuity of Splines
1.9M views • 3 years ago
Freya Holmér
Freya Holmer's 74-minute video essay on splines, covering Bezier curves, B-splines, derivatives and the different levels of continuity (C0, C1, C2), built with custom animation tools. She notes she did not cover non-uniform splines.
9:04Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy
25.4M views • 11 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
Every Frame a Painting analyzes how Jackie Chan stages action comedy, with nine principles such as starting from a disadvantage, using the environment, clear shots, and keeping action and reaction in the same frame.
48:25I messed up. You're using too much detergent.
5.4M views • 5 years ago
Technology Connections
Technology Connections explains dishwasher detergent use, arguing people use too much and that powder beats pods and gels. It follows an earlier dishwasher video and covers enzymes, bleach, rinse aids and when salt is needed.
34:25Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co.
3.6M views • 10 years ago
Mathologer
Mathologer examines how identities like 1+2+3+... = -1/12 arise in Ramanujan's work, starting from his 1913 letter to Hardy. The video explains the rules for summing infinite series and why such results are meaningful but not naive sums.
11:27CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought!
2.4M views • 10 years ago
The 8-Bit Guy
The 8-Bit Guy covers IBM's 1981 CGA graphics system, including how composite output and artifacting produced extra colors beyond the nominal palette. He argues CGA looked better in period than it does on RGB monitors.