Comment by anyfoo

I'm not assuming they are not real images, I'm questioning whether to get to any information density that even out-performs "big enough colorful pixels", you might get into territories where the lossy compression compresses away what you need to unambiguously discriminate between two symbols.

And to get to that level of density I do wonder what kind of detailed "real image" it would still be.

If your algorithm were for example literally the example you just noted, then the "big enough colorful pixels" from the example video already massively outperform your algorithm. Of course it won't be exactly that, but you have the assumption that the video compression algorithm somehow applies the same meaning of "looks like" in its preservation efforts that your machine learning algorithm does, down to levels where differences become so minute that they exceed what you can do with colorful pixels that are just big enough to pass the compression unscathed, maybe with some additional error correction (i.e. exactly what a very high density QR code would do).