said mystery being "what is youtube's minimum resolution?" first google result said no minimum resolution. you know what that means! time to upload a 1x1 video to youtube!
oh.. nope. "Processing abandoned". how cowardly of them.
okay! time to act like a normal person and try out different resolutions until it lets me through. a dozen or so new video files later, i can safely say that youtube does have an effective minimum resolution! and it's not approximately 240p like many google results would have you believe.
it's actually... 15x15. (in reality it's 16x16 since it rounds up to the nearest multiple of 2 presumably due to re-encoding into a new format, but it did let me upload a 15x15 avi (which is a format that supports odd numbered resolutions, unlike mp4 or mov!) so i count that as a win)
i've uploaded a 15x15 video to my youtube channel to demonstrate. look at the stats for nerds in the right click menu to confirm that it is in fact displaying at 16x16.
now some of you may be wondering "why isn't it starting?" or "hey, it took a whole minute to start and there's no video in my video!"
the rest you may be wondering what magic software these people's computers are running to not be able to properly render a 16x16 pink square with avi exporting artifacts.
the magic software, as it turns out, is firefox! it doesn't play h.264 encoded videos with a width less than 34px or a height less than 18px, as documented by this github report... 2 weeks ago?!
so in my quest for a small youtube video i accidentally discovered a (presumably recent) firefox bug, surprisingly close to another person! how cool!
the best part is that i didn't even consider that it could be a browser issue until i was in the middle of writing this post. i figured it was a youtube issue. but after trying it on microsoft edge, i was forced to dive even deeper!
anyway, that's my silly technical-ish longpost for the month. good night cohost. i hope you're as intrigued by 16x16 youtube videos as much as i am.