As I’m (often) running out of bandwidh usage (yay for horrible Canadian ISPs), I have to tell the Netflix service to stream at the lowest quality, which is still at 300 MB per hour.
This triggered a memory of a strange phenomenon in the world of file sharing ten years ago: “Bonsai movies”. Those are simply re-encodes of movies at a ridiculously small dimention and bitrate, the smallest you can before you can’t make sense of the movie anymore. For example, you could fit the movie into a 16th of 480p (180x120) with mono sound at 32 kpbs. This is useful when you have almost no bandwith, and also as a test of the video compressor. An interesting side-effect of how video compression techniques work is that bonsai movies look horrible when zoomed, but look fine at their original size. Also, it is impressive how many movies are quite watchable when displayed so small, which may be a testament to their strong storyline and script.
I haven’t seen bosai movies in years, so I wonder how well H264 or some other MP4 compressor can handle “smart phone from 2007” screen sizes. I might even try to see if I can reasonably fit a TV show episode into email size (< 10 MB, or 56 kbps), and how well or bad it will look.
Published on September 18, 2012 at 21:37 EDT
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