Comment by dzhang314

I'd estimate that there's an easy order-of-magnitude improvement (~10x) just from implementing a simple error-correction mechanism -- a Reed-Solomon code ought to be good enough that we can take the squares down to 10x10, maybe even 8x8 or 5x5. Then, if we really work at it, we might be able to find another order-of-magnitude win (~100x) by packing more bits into a frequency-domain encoding scheme. This would likely require us to do some statistical analysis on the types of compression artifacts that YouTube introduces, in order to find a particularly robust set of basis images.