FFglitch, FFmpeg fork for glitch art | Hacker News Reader

FFglitch, FFmpeg fork for glitch art

ffglitch.org

331 pointscaptain_bender46 comments

I love how we try to recreate things that are errors to add realism to something too clean. I've spent many hours in front of tape machines from analog to digital, and each format has its peculiarities when glitching. The analog formats had drop outs and other noise from the analog nature as well as things like head switching. There were also the various methods of drop out compensation like BCSP that would repeat the last good line which could lead to some interesting "smearing". Then there are other things that get imitated like when a monitor would lose sync and you'd see the horizontal/vertical blanking rolling through the screen or lose one of or swap the UV channels. The digital tape formats that had DCT blocks started displaying what this glitch art is inspired by (for lack of better phrasing). So for someone this "inside baseball", it would be a problem when these issues happened so it takes a second to get over the initial "oh no that needs to be fixed" to "that looks cool!"

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." -Brian Eno

> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature

Exactly how I feel about AI art today, and doesn't make me super hopeful for the future. Hopefully there been cases where that hasn't been true?

But then I remember seeing datamoshing as weird the first times I saw it used as a transition in the "Off the Air" TV series/anthology, nowadays I think it makes me fuzzy and almost nostalgic instead?

Looking forward to cherishing “You are absolutely correct, let me fix that…”

My HAM radio instructor (VE3XT) was a transmitter engineer who lamented the resurgence of tube amps in the 2000s. He said that what young people call “warmth” in sound is distortion that his kinfolk worked tirelessly to eliminate.

I didn’t understand it at first, and then I saw the growing interest in compact cassettes and was metaphorically tearing out my hair.

> CD distortion

WHAT?!

Maybe you mean the dynamic range clipping caused from the bad mastering that happened during the loudness wars, but CD as a medium is impossible to have audio distortion due to its impressive 44.1 kHz sample rate at 16 bit depth.

You speak of "The Loudness Wars." It was a fully intentional choice made by people who knew exactly what they were doing. For the most part, bowing down to label pressure to let people think their stereo is louder.

Except for the guy who did Red Hot Chili Peppers' albums. He was known for compressing sound, and turned it to 12 for the loudness wars. Californication is the poster-child of the issue for a reason.

How does that contradict what I said?

It doesn’t. Conversation isn’t debate

Right, my bad I misunderstood.

No offense taken here. Maybe my tone was confrontational without reason.

> CD distortion

Care to elaborate on that?

It's a quote, so I can only speculate. Maybe he was referring to the effects caused by scratching or other damage on the disk?

Composer William Basinski’s deteriorating analog tape loops: disintegration loops

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mjnAE5go9dI

Not a lot of info on the page about the process, etc, but this is also called "datamoshing." If you're curious, there's a great talk from Demuxed '21 on some of the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtia43DGSrY

Awesome! I remember seeing Datamosh 2 plugin for After Effects, but didn't know it used this open source project. Turns out there is a whole bunch of GUIs for ffglitch: https://ffglitch.org/frontends/

there used to be a running joke in the AfterEffects subreddit that 95% of “What’s this effect called?” questions the answer was datamoshing. I think they even had a bot that would auto answer with datamoshing since it was asked so frequently.

This page doesn't explain what FFglitch does, or how it's different to ffmpeg. For instance, what's Glitch? I'm guessing it's an architecture, but the post doesn't explain what it is or contextualize the term "architecture."

The clearly labeled "What?" button at the top of the page explains everything.

The what button doesn't explain much.

As far as I know, "glitching" is opening a jpeg file with a text editor then deleting random ranges of characters, saving it again and then letting image viewers try to open the file, resulting in artifacts being added to the image.

This project seems to do the same for video files, but generating a valid video at the end.

That is “data bending” (borrowed from “circuit bending”; e.g. opening a toy that makes sound and using ‘a moist finger’ probing the pcb for changes in sound). Glitching is the intentional act of introducing errors in hardware or software, to expose the inner workings (in the case of Glitch art, this was the original aim, to expose ‘the ghost in the machine’). Rosa Menkman wrote extensively about Glitch Art here: https://beyondresolution.info/Glitch-Studies-Manifesto

The best way I've come to describe glitch art in my papers or talks with peers is that a "glitch" in the context of glitch art is the deliberate abuse of a format of media, taking advantage of either noise, compression schemes, or undefined behavior to produce media that would otherwise not exist (due to contraints of, say, a compression algorithm and a binary format like JPEG), or to reproduce media that is discarded by these (and other) mechanisms of the format (The Ghost in the MP3[0] is a fantastic, and arguably the pioneering work in this regard).

Formats such as circuitbending are alien to me, as I primarily work with digital and occasionally analog photos and videos, but generally follow the same principles of breaking away from intended use of some set of rules to express illegal states.

0. https://www.theghostinthemp3.com/theghostinthemp3.html

From what i understand "glitch art" is using compression artifacts and encoding errors as art.

Presumably ffglitch is ffmpeg with code to fudge the file checksums so that encoding errors are allowed to accumulate instead of triggering an error.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch

>Television glitch --> In broadcasting, a corrupted signal may glitch in the form of jagged lines on the screen, misplaced squares, static looking effects, freezing problems, or inverted colors. The glitches may affect the video and/or audio (usually audio dropout) or the transmission. These glitches may be caused by a variety of issues, interference from portable electronics or microwaves, damaged cables at the broadcasting center, or weather.

On computers, those happens when some of the data (video, audio, image) is corrupted or lost.

Glitch art: some of those glitches create cool effects that you can see a sort of photoshop filter ; ffglitch helps you corrupt files/create those effect for artistic purpose.

You can see cool examples of glitch video art there: https://ffglitch.org/gallery/ ; they show the original clip, and then the glitched version

---

You can also have corrupted sounds, you can check 'The Glitch Mob' which is an group creating music, with samples that sounds corrupted.

It's ffmpeg but takes a script as an argument which gives you access to the low level structures of the encoded video stream.

For example you can change the values of the motion vector in each frame.

That way it always generates valid video files.

At university we implemented a DCT+quantization encoder/decoder for audio, and had a buggy version produce these super alien, beautiful sounds. I've often wished I had saved that version.

I know this is three days old but I've been playing with this since I saw this post. It's blowing my mind. I'm obsessed. I've got some cool results from processing many effects on top of each other (one after another) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odiljzvpz_8

Old school techno and a trippy video, love to see it! In case anyone's interested, it's published as "Emmanuel - Chainreaction", available on youtube as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uEj2c1YQc4

There's also the Glitch Lab app on Android and the author has a number of tutorial videos available:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnfdj-gV14N5JTGybk4kkVpyL...

Kanye West's "Welcome to Heartbreak" Is imo one of the best uses of this effect

Here's some "glitch art" made with an SDR transmitter output power set to exactly the SNR threshold of the receiver.

https://www.w6rz.net/pixellation.mp4

One of the projects I've had in mind for a while is implementing a transmitter and receiver pair in GNURadio and adding in noise or otherwise abusing the signal for glitch purposes

Is there any way to use this in conjunction with a mask overlay filter in ffmpeg if I just want to "glitch" part of a video?

My favorite datamoshing video is from 2010 before it was cool

Apres le feu de Jacques Perconte

https://www.jacquesperconte.com/oe?28

You know, i was all ready to be dismissive of this, using encoder errors for art sounds silly.

But i watched the video and it really was cool and artistic.

Plenty of incredible works of art and story telling use glitch art to evoke feelings and notions of "brokenness" or surreality. Some pieces that come to mind are Adventure Time S5E15: A Glitch is a Glitch, created by artist David OReilly[0] and the music video for A$AP Mob - Yamborghini High made by editor Uncle Luc[1].

This of course doesnt even begin to touch on the influences glitch art has had on music and audio - it's arguable that glitch art has its origins in printing, photography/film, and in electronic music, but most deliberate uses of "glitches" as artistic vehicles tended to arise during the early eras of electronic music production. Rosa Menkman speaks in depth about the origins of glitch art in the music scene in her paper The Glitch Moment(um)[2].

0. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/25/datamoshing-land-o...

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt7gP_IW-1w

2. https://mediarep.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b16c898a-c6b...

The quintessential example of glitch art, imo, is Adult Swim's Off the Air, which compiles various short animations and music cut together with various datamoshed transitions. While the glitch stuff isn't always the central focus it definitely goes a long way towards setting the trippy vibe they're going for.

There are too many excellent episodes to list but Animals is a great one to get a feel: https://youtu.be/59QBOO6m210

And the Dan Deacon USA special episode might be peak Off The Air:

https://youtu.be/9X4fYP9bqqw

It can sound cool with music too:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(music)

- group: the glitch mob http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frfs4tkN-AY

Yeah and while I can relate to your first sentiment, it's still infinitely better than some AI slop like this generative music shit that is currently at the top of the frontpage.

Nice, watching too much datamosh / glitch art makes my brain tetris effect glitches in my dreams.

simple in-browser javascript based mp4 glitch datamosher: https://free-online-app.com/glitch-vid-datamosh

this is beautiful, the video with the two guys in the urban landscape was especially inspiring, looking forward to experimenting with this someday

cool art! seeing datamoshing like this always impresses me at how much motion is encoded in modern video codecs

Didn't we already have VLC for this?

Glitch art, not glitch arch. The main page https://ffglitch.org/ is a slightly better introduction to the project.

Updated, thanks!

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