I'm not sure if it would make you YouTube famous, but I'd be interested in a video series where it emphasised how crappy, expedient, short-sighted and idiotic choices in the development of technologies were. I feel the focus on the beauty and amazement is somewhat misleading. It's like a magic trick, they're trying to fool you into thinking this is some superman feat. I want the story of the JPEG told from the "let's…
Except that JPEG built on decades of academic research. It's the exact opposite of a dirty hack that just happens to work well enough to stick. The magic is doing the foundational research, iteratively, painstakingly, over decades, without the constraints of getting a concrete job done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Background > The original JPEG specification published in 1992 implements processes from various…
1) Convert image to YUV color space so that brightness (Y) component can be compressed separately from color (UV) components to which humans are less sensitive.
2) Transform each component (YUV) to frequency domain, then throw away image fine detail, i.e. high frequency components, according to desired level of compression. This obviously is the key idea.
3) Encode remaining frequency components to as small a size a possible
Once the general idea for this approach was conceived, it seems a rather minor step to try DCT vs the more obvious FFT for the frequency encoding. DCT gives slightly better compression. The approach isn't dependent on Huffman encoding for step 3) either - any encoding scheme would work, so experimentation would also have worked there to see what gives best compression on some set of test images.