The file size updated.

: Downscaled to as low as 72p or even smaller (e.g., 8x7 pixels in some theoretical calculations). Frame Rate : Sometimes reduced to save space.

The video began to change. The 8MB limit had been breached. The file was hungry. It started compressing things outside of itself. Leo watched in horror as the icons on his desktop began to dissolve. His folders, his documents, his family photos—they were being sucked into the video player, stripped of their resolution, and pasted onto Shrek’s skin.

"Jesus," he whispered. "Note to self: delete the file."

It had finally captured the high-resolution texture it needed. The movie was now complete.

: The video bitrate is pushed as low as 4.6kbps to 12kbps , while audio is squeezed into a tiny 6kbps to 7.5kbps stream.

The Legend of "Shrek 8MB": How an Ogre Conquered Data Compression

Tell you about other movies that have been subjected to this "extreme compression" challenge.

To achieve this, users utilized cutting-edge codecs like and Opus . The process requires sacrificing almost everything that makes a movie "watchable" by modern standards: