Please enjoy jwz mixtape 174.
Dear music video directors:
For whatever reason, you have decided to shoot your video in 2:35:1 anamorphic widescreen. And then you uploaded it to Youtube as a 1920x1080 video, with 124 pixel tall black letterbox bars at the top and the bottom, burned right into the video. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??
People do this all the time and it makes no goddamned sense. The MP4 format, Youtube and every video player in the world all support videos of arbitrary even heights. Even worse is when they decide to be all retro and 80s and shoot in 4:3 with VHS filters on top, but they still pillarbox it out to 16:9. Double-you tee fuck.
You don't know what shape my screen is. Don't judge me.
Oh, and in "Youtube just gets worse every day" news: Youtube no longer allows me to favorite videos, because "Favorites", though special, are still just implemented as a playlist, and playlists have a maximum of 5,000 entries. Because who would like more things than that? 5,000 favorites should be enough for anybody.
A total pleasure have found this site.....
Could you use the Youtube API and walk thru the favorites (is this what YT calls "Liked videos"?) and move the first four thousand to some other playlist?
There are any number of bullshit things I could do.
Doubling the list length would require adding another bit to the list index. You know how expensive bits are, don't you?
It's more probable that there's some O(n^2) nonsense and it was easier to limit the maximum length of the playlists than to fix it.
Unless you have access to the YouTube source code, your speculative theories are less than worthless.
I could make up random shit, too, you know.
Speculation it is, but not entirely unfounded. Playlist lengths are going to follow a power law, so there will be very few long playlists, and very many short ones. Thus a cap on the length will save only a trivial amount of space.
Stop. Please just stop.
If you think this is an actual reason for anything, then you are assuming that the people who build Youtube are idiots, which they demonstrably are not.
Stop. Please just stop.
If you think a comentator on your blog believes that that is an actual reason for anything, then you are assuming the commentators on your blog are id—
Oh shit.
The random guess I'd make is based on laziness not idiocy. Betcha somewhere in the code is:
#define MAXIMUM_LENGTH 5000
...
song* songlist[0:MAXIMUM_LENGTH-1];
There's even a laziness explanation for db48x's o(n^2) guess. If there's any xml in the playlist datapath then it is likely they're using a pre existing xml parser. Some DOM based xml parsers bog down when a parent tag contains too many children: a flat-ish object hierarchy. I got spanked by Python's minidom module when lists got to about 50000 in length.
Laziness rules in software dev.
OMFG, STOP.
This is a policy decision, not a math decision.
Instead of debating theoretical laziness in API programming, perhaps we could all revel in the glory that is Pussy Riot Presents: Vagina. That is my new favorite thing.
It's for the black bars. I mean, I know some DPs and music video guys from Paris, France (anywhere else in France would be irrelevant, unfortunately), and they're definitely seeing the large black bars as a "cinéma look". That's how most people over their 30's here has experienced the majority of their movies anyway: by watching them on their 4:3 televisions.
I understand why people might make the aesthetic choice of arbitrary aspect ratios.
What makes no damned sense is shooting in one aspect ratio, and encoding in another. It's technical foolishness that results in this kind of nonsense:
Precisely: my point is that, at least according to some people that I don't necessary agree with, the aesthetic choise is not about the aspect ratio per se: it is about the black bars, and the necessity to shoot in a wide aspect ratio and then encode in a narrower one to deliberately add black bars to the video. Because if my ultra-wide faux-70s-anamorphic shot-with-real-film-then-digitally-turned-orange-and-teal music video does not have black bars (you still need to display it fullscreen to have them), how can people notice this is inspired by cinéma? Hell, sometimes music videos use white bars. Go figure.
If I have a 16:9 monitor, and they shoot in 2.35:1 and encode in 2.35:1, I see black bars at the top and bottom. This is what they intend.
If I have a 16:9 monitor, and they shoot in 2.35:1 and encode in 16:9, I see black bars at the top and bottom. This is also what they intend, but makes the file bigger.
If I have a 2.35:1 monitor, and they shoot in 2:35:1 and encode in 16:9, I see black bars at the top and bottom, as well as on the left and right. This is not what they intend.
If I have a 4:3 monitor, and they shoot in 2:35:1 and encode in 16:9, I see double black bars at the top and bottom, which is what they intend, but weird.
Likewise:
If I have a 16:9 monitor, and they shoot in 4:3 and encode in 4:3, I see black bars at the left and right. This is what they intend.
If I have a 16:9 monitor, and they shoot in 4:3 and encode in 16:9, I see black bars at the left and right. This is what they intend, but makes the file bigger.
If I have a 4:3 monitor, and they shoot in 4:3 and encode in 16:9, I see black bars at the top and bottom, as well as on the left and right. This is not what they intend.
If I have a 2.35:1 monitor, and they shoot in 4:3 and encode in 16:9, I see double black bars at the left and right, which is what they intend, but weird.
Like I keep trying to say: the aspect ratio you pick is a valid aesthetic choice. But encoding black letterbox or pllarbox bars into the video itself is simply a technical fuckup that can only make things worse if someone is using a monitor that is not the exact same aspect ratio as the video file you generated.
Have you heard any Honeyblood?