I work in an environment with limited bandwidth. I want to be able to download MP4 files but I don't care much about the quality. What I thought about to theoretically bring down the bandwidth usage to about one eighth would be to only download every fourth pixel and only every second frame.
Let me illustrate what I mean. x
means "skipped".
So let's say we have an MP4 file that has a dimension of 8x4 so a frame looks this:
OOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOO
I'd like to to save bandwidth by only downloading the information needed like this:
OxOxOxOx
xxxxxxxx
OxOxOxOx
xxxxxxxx
So basically every 2x2 pixel block goes from
OO
OO
to
Ox
xx
So it's only one pixel downloaded instead of all four.
I would like to apply the same to frames. If an 8 fps video has a second looking like this
[ O O O O O O O O ]
it shall become this
[ O x O x O x O x ]
so only frames numbered 2*n
get downloaded.
I suppose that would more or less easily be possible with uncompressed files such as plain text documents or BMP images where the data of frame n does not depend on frame n-1 but I would like to know whether any of you can estimate how possible this is with MP4. The coded (?) in question is isomiso2avc1mp41