This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
Compression and transmission of data causes loss of parity. We lose or flip some 1s and 0s. Over time the effects become very noticeable. The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades. In a more reasonable scenario, near lossless file types and compressions would degrade much more slowly.
This has nothing to do with copying a file. YouTube re-encodes videos whenever they are uploaded.
A file DOES NOT DEGRADE when it is copied. That is something that happened to VHS and cassette tapes. It does not happen to digital files. You can even verify this by generating a hash of a file, copy it 10,000 times, and generate a new hash and they would be 100% identical.
You should perform that exact experiment with a sufficient number of bits, you’ll be surprised.
No I won’t be, because I’ve done this before for various reasons, but not a single but was changed.
Let me put it this way. A computer stores programs and instructions it needs to run in files on a drive. These files contain exact and precise instructions for various components to operate. If even a SINGLE bit is off in just a couple of the OS files, your computer will start throwing constant errors if not just crashing entirely.
And this isn’t just theory. It’s provable. Cosmic rays have been known to sometimes hit a drive and cause a bit-flip. Or another issue is a drive not being powered on for a long time causing bit-rot
At this point I’m starting to think you’re a troll. There’s no way someone believes what you’re saying.
Edit: autocorrect
I’m going to stop responding to you few left in this thread because I don’t think you’re trolls, I know you are.
Then you’re not a troll, just completely deluded and frankly stupid. You’ve been getting so many genuine responses trying to help you learn, but you keep digging in your heels and doubling down on being confidently wrong.
Believe whatever you want, just keep it to yourself.
They want to “help me learn” that a form of media storage invented and refined within a couple of decades will outlast all other forms, because they’ve deluded themselves that the things they rely on are perfect and that failure is impossible.
What you’re talking about is 100% unrelated to what the discussion is about. The media the files are stored on are irrelevant. USB flash drives are known to die within just a couple of years in some cases. But when the storage media itself fails, then the data on it is more is less lost. And that includes degradation of the medium itself. That’s why both spinning hard drives and solid state drives need to be powered on and “refreshed” every so often (about a year for solid state and roughly a few years for magnetic). And degradation in this context means beyond the point where each bit can be reliably and accurately read from the medium. Once you go past that point you end up with corrupted data. And that includes pictures and videos. A raw picture probably won’t be affected too much with a single bit flipping, but a jpg for example, will visibly look corrupted. This is what a corrupted jpg looks like. And it can occure with just a single bite or byte being incorrectly changed/saved jpg1 jpg2
And here’s an example of corrupted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-bz21deEeY
All it takes is a single corrupted byte in either the b-frame or i-frame in a video and it will cause that momentary glitch. That’s what happens when data “degrades”. Digitally copying a file absolutely does not “degrade” data each time it is copied. The idea is just laughable. We aren’t talking about copying a VHS tape.
You’re referring to a video codec degrading as it keeps rendering the video again, not just copying and pasting the bits. There is no degradation from copying and pasting a file as-is.
No, I am not referring to that. YouTubers have the option to download their own videos. Not steal it with a video downloading tool.
That’s YouTube’s processed video not the original.
And when you download the processed video and reupload it, it’s a 1 to 1 conversion of the same video codec, and every generation it gets worse. That example is a low hanging fruit, but the concept applies to everything.
That 1:1 conversion through the same codec is very likely lossy. However that’s not a straight file copy which is what you originally said causes degradation.
You really jumped in here to tell me exactly the contents of a comment I made just below it in the thread, as if I didn’t already know it.
I jumped in to point out the flaw in the YouTube experiment you’re referring to.
Can you think of a better visual example that a simple person could see and understand?
No, this is because YouTube compresses every file before distributing it. This happens even when downloading on the creator side.
Literally every file distribution method compresses the media first. A better argument was that YouTube re-encodes the video during the re-upload with a particularly lossy method to save on bandwidth and server space.