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Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, over in r/gamedev, someone just released a tool that does a good job of pixel-arting regular images.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/7ylvt9/pixelator_a...

Bizarrely, the pixelated stuff in the images you linked look way better. You couldn't use the depixelized whale or dolphin or whatever (our link) in a game, it looks awful. Some of the full comparison is even worse:

http://johanneskopf.de/publications/pixelart/supplementary/m...

Mario looks horrid.

But you can use literally any of the pixel art'ed images from your link - they all look truly fantastic and production-ready! They're ready to ship now.

That's a really good video; it really shows the problem. Any still from that image looks pretty great, but I agree that in motion it's no good.

(just a note that you replied to the wrong comment, in case you want to move it)

I'd be interested to see the result of iterating on an image using these tools. Like go from high res to pixel art, back to high res etc.

Like translating a phrase into a foreign language and back repeatedly, I inagine you’d end up with something fun and impressionistic. I’d like to see it too.

Like this? http://www.translationparty.com/

I've never heard of this before but just wasted 20 minutes on it. Very interesting concept with hilarious results

Most things I tried were slightly changed from english to japanese just once, then converged. Maybe it's just my lack of imagination!

Most of what I tried gathered somewhat from English to Japanese. Perhaps it is my lack of imagination!

The best examples, those with more divergent results, are those with a lot of subordinate clauses, which get mixed-up and moved from different parts of the sentence. You can select complex sentences from the list below.

If you're out of imagination you can copy and paste some comments from here and watch the results.

http://www.translationparty.com/bizarrely-the-pixelated-stuf...

From

> Bizarrely, the pixelated stuff in the images you linked look way better.

> But then I remembered I look way better in the morning light.

In one step. Lovely! This sounds like poetry.

For songs there is this: https://www.youtube.com/user/malineka146/videos

> Like translating a phrase into a foreign language and back repeatedly, I inagine you’d end up with something fun and impressionistic.

This exact game features in the plot of Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Galactic Pot-Healer.

I remember back in like 2010, someone uploaded and ripped a YouTube video 1000 times and then edited the natural degradation of the compression. Went from perfectly watchable video to horrible static-y mess.

Here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0

Theoretically, it should be possible to recompress the video back into the compressed file with no loss, provided the same codec is used, but it would be far more expensive computationally.

Aren't most image/video compression algorithms lossy? There would surely be more than one possible "decompression".

Thanks for the link!

This may sound crazy, but I wonder if there's a way to "automate" this deconstruction with ffmpeg...

Update: here's a one-liner that will do exactly that

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -strict -2 -crf 51 output.mp4 && rm input.mp4 && mv output.mp4 input.mp4

For better results, run the above command ten times:

for ((n=0;n<10;n++)); do ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -strict -2 -crf 51 output.mp4 && rm input.mp4 && mv output.mp4 input.mp4; done

Here’s another one up the same alley that is interesting to watch: VHS generation loss.

> What happens if you make a copy of a copy of a copy (and so on) of a VHS tape? This experiment shows how the quality degrades with every generation.

> The copying was done using two PAL VCRs in SP mode.

> (The video is Fading like a flower by Roxette)

https://youtu.be/mES3CHEnVyI

The authore of the depixelising algorithm actually also did something like that:

"Content-Adaptive Image Downscaling" http://johanneskopf.de/publications/downscaling/

I always thought it was sad that it didn't get as much attention. I think it could also interesting to use in thumbnail generation based on regular photos, for example.

Going to ask in that reddit thread if the author is already aware of this algorithm. Might be able to take some cool new ideas from it if they don't! :)

Huh, that's actually quite interesting - but for an entirely different purpose.

My better half enjoys a bit of cross stitch. For a cheapo little gift I've played with outputting custom cross-stitch patterns based on pixellating images and reducing the number of colors to something more manageable, but it's often a little janky in GiMP and requires a bunch of manual tweaking - for anything remotely detailed it quickly becomes more hassle than it's worth.

This, on the other hand, might just do the trick!

This was my first thought as well. I've gotten decent at using photoshop to do this with generous use of cutouts and indexed color modes to custom forced palettes, but it's a very laborious process.

Playing with this, it's very effective for solid-color graphics as it quickly settles in on a nice limited palette. The line-work also does a reasonable job, limiting the manual fixing to areas where lines converge and so forth.

I'm working on writing up a post for /r/crossstitch comparing some different methods, so check over there in a while if you're interested.

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