Looking for software to change depth of video to 1 bit per color (meaning 3bits in total)?

[retrorage]

Hi,
I am looking for software to change bit depth of video to 1 bit per color (meaning 3bits in total)? If it's possible, I want the software to convert video file to actually contain 3 bits per pixel. so it can reduce the size of video files. i think in old days when internet was very slow and that time video conference may use codec which decrease the video depth to reduce file size for send video data on efficiently through old slow dailup modems. or in early 90s maybe they use a codec reduce the depth of video to fit large video file on a single floppy disk. i mean any old video format which convert video depth into only 3bits.

Here I also found a question about this on Quora but find no solution in the answers.

How can I change a bit depth of video to 1 bit per color (meaning 3 in total)? If it's possible, I want the video file to actually contai...

Answer (1 of 2): The problem you will encounter doing this is that no one else in the world actually wants to store 1 bit per colour for video. So there is no video file format I know of that stores images the way you want. That means you will have to implement some of the code yourself. There a...

www.quora.com

 

[Svenska]

On PCs, there never was any 3bpp color format. The common low-color depths were 1bpp (monochrome) and 4bpp (16-color RGBI).

That also means that you won't find many codecs supporting this color depth and therefore no software. You can easily roll your own, but you need to also write the video player.

Fitting a "large video file" on a single floppy disk does not work or it would have been done. I believe you are overestimating the space on a regular floppy disk.

 

[krebizfan]

The easiest way would be to create color planes providing 3 monochrome bitmaps, one for each color. Combine with RLE compression cutting the size significantly if the planned animation was something like a stick figure moving over an empty field. There may be an implementation of this idea but I can't remember an example.

Maybe checking Sinclair Spectrum software which involved storing color with minimal bandwidth could provide some more practical ideas.

 

[JohnElliott]

On PCs, there never was any 3bpp color format. The common low-color depths were 1bpp (monochrome) and 4bpp (16-color RGBI).

Windows 1 and 2 used a 3bpp colour format on EGA and VGA, but that's a bit early for video codecs.

 

[thisisamigaspeaking]

Would be easy to write something to do this yourself. What input and output format are you looking for?

 

[retrorage]

Yea i think that time early windows os not support video.
even if i extract all frames on video through ffmpeg and convert them to 1 bit png or gif format. then if make mp4 or avi again with these all frames then video will again encoded back to 8bit per color because these video formats not support 1 bit per color.

 

[thisisamigaspeaking]

Yea i think that time early windows os not support video.
even if i extract all frames on video through ffmpeg and convert them to 1 bit png or gif format. then if make mp4 or avi again with these all frames then video will again encoded back to 8bit per color because these video formats not support 1 bit per color.

Could just output them to raw but the file size would not be small. A 1.44MB floppy could fit like 2 seconds of 320x200x3bpp 30 fps raw?

 

[Timo W.]

Fitting a "large video file" on a single floppy disk does not work or it would have been done. I believe you are overestimating the space on a regular floppy disk.

Depends on what "large" is. 3 minutes were done already, I think LGR featured such a video on floppy disk not too long ago.

Question is: why?

Also note that color depth does not have such an impact on file size as you might think. If the bit rate does not change, nor does the size of the video. The color depth would only affect picture quality and CPU load when decoding.