The decoder is the sampler. The wire carries a chemistry, a schedule and a sparse scaffold of hard-clamped pixels; the receiver thermalizes everything in between as an exact conditional. This is not compression in the usual sense — it moves the boundary between what is transmitted and what is recomputed. It follows that it works where the content's structure is local and statistical, and fails where it is not. Both cases are below, measured, because the failure is the point.
| keep 1 in | wire B | ratio | vs PNG | PSNR dB | agreement |
|---|
PNG is the honest baseline for a single still: it is lossless on the same quantized image, so a ratio below 1.0 against it means this codec is losing outright on that content.
Each frame is decoded against the previous decoded frame as its scaffold, so only pixels whose class actually changed are sent. A static region costs nothing; a moving one costs what it disturbs.