Each standard has a specific texture which we have foregrounded in the lossless series. Normally we are asked to look past the compression artifacts to see only the media. We identify the artifacts through this procedure, but only in a negative way: like fog on a lens.
Abandon the idea that one type of compression is better than another and you may start to appreciate the qualities of this compression in its own right.
This investigation has revealed two things to us:
- digital media represent the world very differently than film or video
- the artifacts are often beautiful in themselves
And by extension, that media may be defined by its artifacts.
Here are a couple of stills which demonstrate the spatial differences between two frames. It is left to the reader to investigate the temporal dimension of these textures.
MPEG-2 vs MPEG-4 encoding found on YouTube
see also about MPEG and current state of projection
Discussion