Unfavorable Semicircle was a YouTube channel that contained tens of thousands of enigmatic video clips. The original unnamed series videos have following characteristics:
- 50×50 resolution
- 30 fps (with very few exceptions)
- 120 frames (making for exactly 4 seconds of length)
- solid background of seemingly random color
- most of the videos have single dark pixel in the frame in seemingly random place
- the videos that do not contain discernible dark dot have either very dark background or dark ultramarine blue
- the audio track is one of
- silence
- human voice spelling a letter or saying a number
- human voice saying a full set of letters and numbers
- pieces of distorted music later found in its entirety in DELOCK video
- various other odd sounds
Since I have not found any information about the dark dots and their distribution in the frames, I decided to try to look into them to see if there's anything interesting. For that purpose I have written this little program. Here is what it does:
- it uses ffmpeg to average first 60 frames into a PNG image (this step probably isn't needed, but the idea was to clean up some of the compression artifacts)
- it loads the image and tries to find the dark dot
- all of the above is done for every video in the series
- after all of the videos are processed result is saved in the form of JSON file
- there is small script to generate map of the pixels
Not much, really. Around 91% percent of clips have detectable and unambiguous dark pixel. When you plot these in a 50×50 grid you get what looks entirely random. I have not actually analyzed this for randomness, but visually there are no discernible patterns.
usfs-darkdot expects list of directories that will be searched for MP4 clips, if there is no argument, current directory is searched instead. After the program
finishes running, it will save usfs-darkdot.json in current directory. You will need quite a few prerequisites for this to work. First of all you need ffmpeg build
with the tmix filter compiled in. Then you also need a bunch of non-default Perl libraries: Moo, Path::Tiny, JSON::MaybeXS, Imager, Term::ANSIColor.
usfs-darkdot-heatmap will read the above JSON file and generate a terminal pseudographics that represents the distribution of the dots; default is to generate
grayscale map, but you can also use heatmap coloring with --heatmap command-line option. Note, that you need terminal that supports 24-bit colors.
Directory results contains my resulting JSON file with both variants of the graphics.