Back at the start May, I was shooting some video with my phone (you know yourself, home porno and stuff). I was reviewing some of these classics when I noticed something odd with one of the videos. When I previewed it in the phones native gallery app, the original thumbnail would appear initially, but then it would suddenly change to the "HBO - Original Programming". At first I thought I had a video on the phones memory card that I had forgotten about but I was sure I never copied a HBO video onto the card, and I had only recently formatted it anyway.
The fact that the thumbnail kept changing made me a little worried, because while the video was just a short random video of a sitting room*, the tv was on and it just so happened that some genuine "HBO original programming" audio was recorded on the sound track. I was convinced that there was some kind of hideous Android "sub-routine" running which scanned your personal files and cross checked them online for copyrighted material. I see what can be done with Youtube copyright control, we are living in the techno-era after all. The Sky box could have been pumping out subliminal "mega-waves", strobe flashing, or high frequency audio, encoding the owner details of the video.
I eventually figured there has to be a more mundane reason for what had happened; the fact that I couldn't replicate the event proved it. I looked at the hidden files on my memory card and found a folder full of thumbnails, I found the HBO one amidst a lot of other ones for (long deleted) files. It's then that I remembered that while I never copied a HBO video to my phone, I had streamed the Adi Roche "Chernobyl Heart" film from my computer as a test in April, and indeed, the very first frame of that video was the HBO logo. Somehow, the hi-res thumbnail's name got mixed up with my videos name and that's why it showed up, and indeed that's why the thumbnail would morph when I previewed the clip, because it was switching between the two thumbnail resolutions. Case solved.
In a way, I'm a little disappointed that technology hasn't advanced to a stage where the Copyright Police can track video content from 3gp video soundtracks you've recorded on your phone. Then again...
* I had to double check that I didn't write Shitting Room. I have a habit of Freudian slips.
0 comments:
Post a Comment