How To Break: Videos

How To Break: Videos

The classic video. A great way of combining audio and visual components to make high quality, entertaining, or informative products. A great way to spread a message or express yourself. Today we will be tossing all of that aside in the pursuit if trash.

Shit you need to get this started:

To start, I will posting a ffmpeg command that will get you the compressed to shit video.
ffmpeg -i input.whatever -vf scale=85:-1 -c:v libvpx -b:v 1k -b:a 1k -deadline best output.webm
This command is complex, but each part will be explained in full by the end of it. Lets start with breaking it down: This command takes the input (input.whatever) applies the visual effect of scale to it, the scale is 85x-1. The -1 is representative of whatever the file's aspect ratio is equal to. For example, the width of 85 with an aspect ratio of 16:9 would lead to a height of 47.81, rounded up to 48. So it'll take input.whatever, down (or up)-scale it to said size and then move onto the codec. The codec is the -c, the :v appended says its the video codec its refering to. This codec can be swapped out of your choosing, but libvpx has given me the best results. -b:v changes the bitrate of the video. In this example its only 1 kilobyte per second, a disgusting video to say the least. -b:a does the same to the audio, making it have that low quality crunch. The final option, deadline, indicates it wants the cpu to takes it time and use the most resourced it can to get the best compression, this can lead to a lower file size and slightly more compression. This over all turns a video that looks fine into one that looks like absolute garbage. Videos below are hosting on another website, watch if you wish.

Original:

Converted:

As you can see, this video has lost a lot of quality. So much so it went from 788.5 kB to 17.6 kB, a massive milestone for quality loss. It sounds like the pits of hell, it looks like a crunchy granola bar, and it, as it is, is fucking terrible. Though, there is more we can do. Its framerate is too high for my liking, so by just replacing -vf scale=85:-1 with -vf scale=85:-1,fps=fps=1 the quality is lowered as the frames per second are lowered down to one.

Framedrop:

For most people, those first two are good enough. These videos are disgusting, they're awful, they're almost unwatchable and you know how to use ffmpeg to get them to your liking, but there are some who want something corrupt. Something absolutely chaotic and disgusting. If you are one of those people, I will re-introduce you to our first command.
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i mylist.txt -sn -vf scale=85:-1,fps=fps=1 -c:v libvpx -b:v 25k -b:a 5k -deadline best output.webm
If you didn't know, ffmpeg supports merging files via catcon. This can be seen at the begining, along with -safe 0, and the input being a text file. This allows you to merge multiple videos together into one, usually used in production, but will used today to make the worst video to be created by any human. To understand how to do this, you need to know how to create a file list of what to merge. An easy way is to find a file with a crapload of videos and (if you're on a Unix system or a system that supports ls) ls > mylist.txt. This will list every file in that folder at that location. Then you edit it with sed/awk/bash/vim/whatever method you like to follow the following format:

file 'A.whatever'

file 'B.whatever'

file 'C.whatever'

file 'D.whatever'

Once this is done, give the command a whirl and it will start converting. The more errors you see the better, that means its working perfectly. By the end of the conversion you should get a monstroisty like this that if watched long enough eventually breaks and accesses garbage data stored in it or just crashes your media player (or webpage). An ultimate form of corruption:

Now you know how to make fucking garbage, thank me if you want, donate if you please, and happy shitposting. More trashtorials to come soon enough.