When I watch ‘reels’ on Facebook, and sometimes on YouTube, the images are reversed. (i.e., mirror images show text backwards.) Is there a reason why people do this?
AIUI, to try to get around content matching bots.
Can you elaborate? What is a content matching bot, and why do people want to get around them?
It’s a way to compare your content to other content.
Getting around it for copyright evasion, not being demonetized, and not having to deal with copyright claims (which can get not only the content removed but your channel taken down).
I think the only time I’ve seen reversed videos is some random guy posting full episodes of a TV show (in the hopes of not being taken down by copyright searches, one assumes).
Of course, it mostly doesn’t work, since it’s also trivial for the content-detector bots to check for videos being reversed, and anyone with the resources and incentive to deploy such a bot at all is likely to also have the resources and incentive to do it right.
For example, there is a woman who has a cat named Penny. She has conversations with Penny, with Penny being voiced by her very young daughter. I’ve often noticed that the images are reversed.
It might be an iPhone thing.
It’s sometimes nothing more than stylistic or editorial reasons like the character entering from the left instead of right. This happens a lot in film and video but it’s easier to notice when there’s writing or a continuity error that pop up more often in youtube and other amateur productions.
I was going to say, if you’re in selfie mode, the image is reversed so it has a more nat ural mirroring effect when you watch it live. That is, when you move your left hand to the left, you see your left hand moving to the left, whereas from an observer’s/camera’s point of view, the hand is moving to audience right. I believe there is a way to flip it as it saves or streams. But I have several friends who post videos of them playing instruments, say, and it weird as I know they’re right-handed and everything is left-handed in the video.
The preview mode on front (selfie) cameras shows the image reversed because the only way people normally see themselves is in a mirror, so it would look unnatural if not displayed that way. My Android phone has an option to actually save the photo as reversed or not (which I keep disabled as sane people should). As far as I can tell, there is no option to save a video (as opposed to a photo) as reversed, even if recorded on the front camera. Maybe iPhones have such an option.
Agree. It’s about preventing e.g. Youtube’s copyright police from catching someone who posts pirated content.
I’ll say it did work for a long time. It may not work as well well now, (and may not at all; I just don’t know).
But the folks posting twice or thrice stolen content aren’t tech geniuses. By now the reversal may have become “cargo cult” publishing, but the folks seem to still be following their cult.
Of course we also don’t see the reversed vids that e.g. YouTube has already detected and shit-canned. We only see the ones the algorithm missed for whatever reason or that haven’t been examined yet.
I watch a lot of dumb vids that are themselves anthologies comprising many shorter vids of the same genre. I see lots of reversal. I also see the same 4 clips in multiple versions by multiple publishers, but in different orders each time, or with a slightly different cropping.
All of which strikes me as low-effort manual ways to defeat some of the hosting sites’ anti-piracy features some of the time. Which evidently does work. Some of the time.
That makes sense. In the ‘Penny’ videos, I notice it when the woman is talking to the camera.
Years ago I remember sitting with my tween daughter as we watched tween girl shows on YouTube (think “Victorious” and similar). She would find those weird flipped videos quite often, but that wasn’t the most annoying. Occasionally some pirate would do some random zoom, crop, pan thing that showed zoomed in sections of the video and moved around every four or five seconds, randomly changing the zoom level. It was all but unbearable to watch.
Another way people would try to sneak movies/tv shows past monitoring software is to change the speed, so an hour of video might play in 40 minutes, or 80.
That’s another way to evade the scanners, but it makes your content significantly less desirable.
I think it started on certain social media apps that allowed you to record video on the app itself. If you used the selfie camera, it preserved the preview’s mirrored orientation. Then iPhones introduced that same feature because that’s what people had gotten used to. Now, that’s the default style for selfie videos.
That’s what I gather from the cyber-ether.
Yet another thing people try in the hope that they can fool content bots are “reaction videos”, which show the pirated content (e.g. an episode from a copyrighted show) as a picture-in-picture inset, with the main frame showing some random person’s facial expression as they’re watching that content.
And of course, let’s not forget the people who think they can get away with it by just saying so, with nonsensical statements like “No copyright intended”.