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Trying to convert my videos into old enough codecs/containers to play on ancient PCs

Maikudou said:
Won’t it be even more demanding in terms of IO throughput? I also don’t know many uncompressed formats with sound from Win9x era.
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No actually it will be less demanding since the file doesnt have to be decrpted. then and now thats how you work with files in editing to make it faster.

Many formats from the 9.x era exist. I am unfortunately separated from my precious vintage computers at present or I could provide more details. There's some sort of video equivilant to a .wav file thats just raw uncompressed video+audio.
 
That was it! Yeah there is an uncompressed .avi format tht should work well. Especially if the quality doesn't need to be great.
 
Hey guys, I found an excellent site called online-convert.com and it let me convert to MPEG-1 codec video and MP2 for the audio!

The video files play pretty good on the Tecra 8000 now. I had to use MP2 for the audio (not mp3) because the software was fussy. The videos are a little choppy sometimes in playback, but are good enough for my needs.

I wonder if I can play the files on even slower laptops... Someday I'll try them with Win9x and my PII 233 laptop. (Tecra 8000 #2)
 
I know full-screen video was pretty tough back then. I had some 133mhz laptops I screwed around with ages ago, couldn't manage even VHS-quality video playback.
 
AVI is not a format, it’s a container. But what would I know, I spent just 9 years working developing video streaming apps
 
I wonder how big my videos converted to uncompressed AVI would be? Space is an issue. For compatibility reasons I only use up to 32GB SD cards (In IDE adapters) for the OS on my laptops.

online-convert.com worked great for me and I'm satisfied, but I am curious about this other solution.


I have 3 video files made for my daily workout. After the conversion to MPG files with MPEG-1 and MP2 codecs, this is how big each file is:

1st video: 9 minutes at 187MB

2nd video: 5 minutes at 117MB

3rd video: 5 minutes at 72MB
 
Uncompressed AVI would run to about 2 GB per minute with VGA style resolutions. The smaller 320 by 240 or so would only need 1/4 of the space. Also note that the system has to be able to reliably transfer at that rate. Many of the early IDE interfaces would be too slow.

I wish I could find what the playback limits for the SMV format were. The MP3 players that used it had fairly slow ARM chips so it might have been possible to play the format on a Pentium if any player accepted the format.
 
there are some better tools available. DaVinci Resolve will let you do everything you you can imagine from a modern windows PC. You could also grab an old version of Adobe Premier off of Archive.org if you want to see what video editing was like in the 9x era. Both are pretty intuitive.

Key thing is using an actual piece of software will give you total control over the output, as opposed to some converter website.
 
krebizfan said:
Uncompressed AVI would run to about 2 GB per minute with VGA style resolutions. The smaller 320 by 240 or so would only need 1/4 of the space. Also note that the system has to be able to reliably transfer at that rate. Many of the early IDE interfaces would be too slow.
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Did you never work with uncompressed AVI files during the win9x age? I dont know where everyone gets off with these calculations. They played just fine. Better even on a mediocre computer.

I was into digital video editing back then. We always had to convert our projects to AVIs to do all the cutting(just too slow to work with otherwise). Took up a ton of room but again the files always played flawlessly even on the real shit computers I was using for editing.
 
One does not need video editing software suites to convert some files, come on, next we will start using ai for that. Just use FFmpeg and 10000 gui frontends for it if it’s to complicated.
 
Maikudou said:
One does not need video editing software suites to convert some files, come on, next we will start using ai for that. Just use FFmpeg and 10000 gui frontends for it if it’s to complicated.
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if you're going to take that attitude no one "needs" to play video files on a vintage computer at all. just use your cellphone like a normal person. but then we wouldnt be here on this community.

Maikudou said:
Idk, math?
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Yeah. Doing math to disprove something instead of trying it. If I weren't currently evacuated from a wildfire I'd boot up one of my 9x machines and demonstrate that it works fine. Try it for yourself.
 
You’re being unreasonable, here let me do some boring thing called math:
ts’s files are 720x480 pixels. It’s 345,600 pixels per frame. Assuming we don’t use 256 colors 1 bite color depth, it will be at least 2 bites per pixel, or 3 bites in 16mlns of colors, so 1036800 bites, almost megabyte per frame. We have 29 frames per second, this makes it roughly 29 megabytes per second. Which makes it, bear with me, 29*60=1,740 megabytes, around 1.5 GB per minute of uncompressed video.

It does not align with memory of working with “uncompressed” avi because there is no such thing. Avi is a container. It can contain a lot of different codecs, even mpeg2. Probably you mean some lossless codec or dv-avi, which is what came by default from cameras back then. It is compressed.

And no, you don’t need a video production suite to encode files, it might not even capable to do so, as it will use an Encoder after rendering, often a separate application.

People do need to watch movies on old computer and I give a person exact commands listing how to achieve that in a way that most definitely work for them and have decent quality.
 
Maikudou said:
You’re being unreasonable, here let me do some boring thing called math:
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You can do all the math you want. It doesn't change the fact that you can play an uncompressed .avi file over a USB 1.1 connection. Don't believe me? Try it on period hardware.
 
computerdude92 said:
My idea is to have video files that can play on all my computers, as a convenience.
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How do you feel about slashing the quality even further? There's some formats that can play on damn near anything if you cut it less-than-VHS resolution. Might still work considering what you've described.
 
In 9th grade I had the jankest editing rig you ever saw. I somehow got my hands on a USB-to-SCSI device and a couple full-height SCSI drives. One sat loose on my desk, the other in half a single height enclosure. I also had a 3.5" in there. The whole daisy chain only worked at USB 1.1 speeds but came out to about 13 extra gbs of storage, important since my eMachines eTower only had a 4gb internal drive. My 433mhz celeron with 32mb of RAM and no graphical accelerator was slow as heck to edit videos and took all night to render.

That absurd SCSI setup? could still play uncompressed avi files. Thats how id test files for editing. I miss that rig sometimes.
 
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