YouTube mystery clips' French connection

Just saw this on BBC ... Did a search, and seems not on ATS ... I feel 'the grey area' sounds teh right place to put this ...

On 23 September 2013 at 14:45, YouTube user Webdriver Torso quietly uploaded a video.

The mysterious 11-second sequence of red and blue rectangles could easily have been lost, unexplained and unappreciated among YouTube's plethora of kittens and music videos.

But 28 minutes later Webdriver uploaded an almost identical video, and another an hour after that, and another, until eight months later - apparently happy with nearly 80,000 clips - they fell silent, with 236 hours of video to their name.

Almost all of the uploads follow the same pattern - 10 slides, each with a red rectangle, a blue rectangle and a computer-generated tone.

The shapes change size and the notes change pitch. Each video appears to be unique, but the format stays the same.

... In about an hour I had the data on every video posted by Webdriver since the account was created.

Having all this information in one place meant that I could do some analysis to see if there were any patterns.
Tireless worker

A few graphs later and I had confirmed that Webdriver was a prolific worker.

At the peak, over Christmas, Webdriver was uploading a video on average every two minutes, presumably in between opening presents.

Webdriver also never sleeps, uploading about 400 videos on most days, every day Monday to Sunday.

I then turned my gaze to looking for anomalies in the data, discovering that of the tens of thousands of videos on the channel, they are all exactly the same length, except for two.

www.bbc.co.uk...

I know i should write about my opinion here ... But truth is .. i don't have one .. I usually jump to the 'far out' conclusions, and then when i see ATS members solve the mystery by breaking it down logically, i think, well i'm glad i kept my theory to myself

But cannot help feel, that, someone has created some software, to automatically create these, and just keep uploading them .. purpose being very vague and mysterious.. to see if anyone ever notices, and when they do, will the world tune in and wonder about this mystery .. Because in my mind, it just takes one child minded person with the know how, and the sadness, to create such an egotistical self-entertaining experiment on the world, with no purpose other than to know ... 'i did that .. gotcha world' ....

ETA - forgot to add ... over to you ATS'ers ... what do you think ?
Here is his youtube channel: www.youtube.com...

I'm guessing some developer at Google is getting a good chuckle right now.

My first though, as a software engineer, is that this was a robot set up to test the YouTube API. And once it is working, why not keep it running as a catch for any errors or backwards incompatibilities with new versions?

Of course, it could just be some random guy having fun with the API, but either way, it seems pretty obvious that the videos, as well as the uploads, are handled programmatically.

originally posted by: lemmin
Of course, it could just be some random guy having fun with the API, but either way, it seems pretty obvious that the videos, as well as the uploads, are handled programmatically.

Bingo.

It would be incredible indeed (as well as the more appealing scenario) if a person did all of that manually, and the videos were some kind of elaborate coded message.

a reply to: Segenam

Notice that most of the videos at this point only have 1 to 3 views, in general ... whats the purpose if nobody is watching?

There are 77 389 videos (at present time) with 10 slides each and 10 music tones.. a slide with geometry variations and sound could represent an instruction .. or anything else by that matter... dnk..

could be at least 773 890 instructions... or even more
if sound has a meaning per si.. then is 7 738 900 instructions
if geometry, position and sound then 77 389 000 instructions
etc..

just an experience, virus/bug..., code from AI... Aliens , a genius ...

edit: French fries (people?!) ? Eiffel tower (antenna?!)? ... good challenge to brake this one

a reply to: Segenam

711...

Maybe it's a message? Like the Russian radio signals. Or a language, like Vampyr.

Regardless, I'm interested. Not going to watch/listen to the videos though ...just in case....

Maybe they are some kind of elaborate cipher for decoding coded communications.

Maybe they are an attempt at new media art.

It could be advertisement all the vids start with tmp who are worldwide advertising agency...

www.tmp.com...

a reply to: BoovDawg
well tmp.... I think is an automatic generated name by youtube for the vid..
I dont buy that one

edit: what you mean with 711...?

a reply to: voyger2

Oh lol

These types of weird videos could be the first sign of the internet gaining consciousness. Skynet in the making

It was, in fact, a robot set up for testing

Mystery Solved

a reply to: lemmin

ha ha .. very good ... good find man

in the time it took me to drive a crash a train around grangemouth in train simulator ... and i dont even like trains ..

so assumin that is the answer .. which it probably is .. someone should maybe let that guy from BBC know ... or get his job ...

i wonder how these got spotted in first place .. i mean i love squares as much as the next guy ... but someon paid close enough attention to the vidz etc to make a mystery out of it ... humans are funny

oogy !!

Isaul Vargas, a New York-based software tester, spotted the videos in a post on BoingBoing and recognised them from an automation conference he had been at a year ago. They were being shown by a European firm that made streaming software for set-top boxes, the kit that sits under a TV and connects to services such as Sky or Netflix.

The company needed to be able to quickly and reliably upload digital video, a capability which it tested by uploading short, randomly generated snippets to its YouTube channel and running image-recognition software on it. "Considering the volume of videos and the fact they use YouTube, it tells me that this is a large company testing their video encoding software and measuring how Youtube compresses the videos," says Vargas.

So there's the answer. What looked like an insight into the murky world of espionage, or maybe even something otherworldly, turns out to be a little bit of a quality-control system leaking into the outside world

2 sec of googling "aqua.flv"

There you go.

Even if we somehow combine them together, I don't know what sort of thing we would get. Most plausible, for me at least, is to test the Youtube API.