Avian’s Blog

This happens if you try to compress a picture with Ogg Vorbis.

Original picture:

Same picture after compression (highest quality) and decompression:

Original picture:

After compression and decompression:

I think this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase lossy compression.

Here is the shell script I used to make these pictures.

Update: This was not meant to be a serious experiment. I was just curious what would I get if I would try to compress something that is not audio with an audio codec. I did expect pictures to look bad, however I was surprized at just how much a specialized lossy compression sucks for arbitrary data. I mean I didn't expect to just get static - there are some similarities between audio and image compression after all.