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

[computerdude92]

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.

Haha! I like the way you put that. As long as the "slashed" video files stay small, I'm open to learning an easy way to make them playable on slower systems.

For now, the slowest system in my collection is a (Bad mobo) 200MHz Pentium MMX Gateway Solo 2500. My oldest working one is my 2nd Tecra 8000 with it's Pentium II 233. I haven't played with Tecra PII 233 much because it needs it's cooling fan replaced.

The only vintage systems I collect are laptops. The biggest requirement is that they need to be new enough to have a BIOS capable of booting from CDs to install my OS. I don't want to rely on floppy disks anymore to boot from CD.

BTW, what year were you in 9th grade, hunterjwizzard? I was class of 2011. I started my hobby of building and fixing computers in May the same year. It was so much fun building my first PC from scratch, as well as playing with vintage ones. My first custom I built was an Athlon II X2 270 3.4GHz with 2GB DDR3 1333, and an 80GB SATA1 HDD. (Borrowed from an old P4 HP workstation) The mobo was the ECS A880GM-M6. WinXP SP3 really flew!!!

 

[hunterjwizzard]

BTW, what year were you in 9th grade, hunterjwizzard? I was class of 2011. I started my hobby of building and fixing computers in May the same year. It was so much fun building my first PC from scratch, as well as playing with vintage ones. My first custom I built was an Athlon II X2 270 3.4GHz with 2GB DDR3 1333, and an 80GB SATA1 HDD. (Borrowed from an old P4 HP workstation) The mobo was the ECS A880GM-M6. WinXP SP3 really flew!!!

I was class of 2003. My freshmen year would have been 1999/2000. I got the aforementioned 433mhz celeron for christmas of '98(still have it, assuming my house hasn't burned down).

There's a lot of fun to be had working with video editing software from the era. Obviously it is not "necessary" or even "good", but you can have some very real entertainment trying out the different programs. The cheap consumer grade stuff you could buy at kmart in the late 90s was interesting. I think Adobe had some kind of patent on the kind of basic linear editing we're used to today, but I still managed to stumble my way through creating anime music videos in my late teens. I still have at least the box to my first video software, I can see what the name was tomorrow assuming my house is still standing(I am mostly kidding here, its in the evac zone but clear of the actual fire).

You might even give Windows Movie Maker a whirl, I believe it is built in/included in Windows 2000. Unfortunately I don't have access to a retro system to try it with

 

[Svenska]

It doesn't change the fact that you can play an uncompressed .avi file over a USB 1.1 connection.

You are bullshitting. What you call "uncompressed .avi file" was never uncompressed to start with. Those files used the Microsoft Video 1, Intel Indeo or Cinepak encodings. All these are simple, lossy video compression schemes. Compared to the various MPEG formats (WMV is similar to MPEG4), these decode a lot faster on low-end hardware, but they also sacrifice image quality and do not compress as well.

An uncompressed VGA frame has 640 x 480 pixels at 4 bytes per pixel, or 1228800 (640*480*4) bytes. At 30 frames per second, you end up with 36864000 (640*480*4*30) bytes/second, or 36000 KiB/s. That data rate exceeds what IDE, USB 1.1 or even ISA are capable.

Try saving a small video as a sequence of uncompressed BMP files. Then you know how large actually uncompressed data is.

 

[computerdude92]

Best wishes and prayers that your house makes it through the wildfire. Stay safe!

I heard of DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere. You mentioned them earlier. I think I tried Resolve a few years back or it was something like it. It was super complicated and I didn't take the time to figure it out. The best video editing software I've successfully used is XP Movie Maker LOL!

I love software that makes video editing simple and easy. Life is short, and I don't really want any features other than basic editing. XP Movie Maker would be the ideal software for me today, if it wasn't so out of date.

I tried the newer Windows Movie Makers but they all suck. Some capped the video FPS below 30, and another won't let you save in MP4. I also experienced bitrate consistency issues. (With the saved edited video files compared to the originals)

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Best wishes and prayers that your house makes it through the wildfire. Stay safe!

Much appreciated! I am at present hovering juuuust outside the evacuation zone. It looks like the firefighters are winning.

I heard of DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premier. I think I tried Resolve a few years back or it was something like it. It was super complicated and I didn't take the time to figure it out. The best video editing software I've successfully used is XP Movie Maker LOL!

DaVinci Resolve is professional-grade software(its what was used to cut together all the Marvel movies, for example). It has the advantage of offering a totally free(even add0free) version that can do nearly everything, and an affordable pro-version that you can actually own. If you're serious about video editing its worth taking the time to learn. But you don't sound serious, lol, so probably not your jam.

"Modern" adobe premier is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud now and I would not wish that garbage on my worst enemy. Adobe is continuing on momentum now and DaVinci is hurting their bottom-line badly by selling a product thats better in every way.

That ebing said. If you are into retro computing, old versions of Adobe premier, like 6.0 from the year 2000, are really interesting to work with. The interface hasn't changed very much but I think the older versions are more intuitive. I certainly had little trouble teaching myself in highschool.

I love software that makes video editing simple and easy. Life is short, and I don't really want any features other than basic editing. XP Movie Maker would be the ideal software for me today, if it wasn't so out of date.

I tried the newer Windows Movie Makers but they all suck. Some capped the video FPS below 30, and another won't let you save in MP4. I also experienced bitrate consistency issues. (With the saved edited video files compared to the originals)

Yeah unfortunately no one seems to want to make a very simple video editing program today. Simple timeline editing like you get in Resolve or Premier is tough to find in a program with fewer superfluous features. I miss the days when you had to run stuff through 5 different programs that each did one or two things really well

 

[Svenska]

Much appreciated! I am at present hovering juuuust outside the evacuation zone. It looks like the firefighters are winning.

I also hope that everything will work out well for you. Good luck and stay safe.

 

[Zare]

I remember watching South Park the movie on a POS IBM system with a slight AV desync, iirc the system was a Pentium. If there was an MMX around, that old WMA/RM we used to grab off the pirate satellite links should play ok, in sync. I still have my first Star Trek downloaded collection, the first episode (Caretaker 1) of Voyager came in several tens of megabytes asf file, was horrible to watch fullscreen in 1024x768.

And speaking of that, in that early video age I recall having files that we dubbed "not to be played in fullscreen", compressed beyond belief.

Some exact codec tips have been given already. More than that, it's worthwhile peeking into shovelware CDs of the age and get the AV coding utilities that were on them, age appropriate.

 

[Zare]

Then you know how large actually uncompressed data is.

Yup. IBM designed CGA as 32kB of pixels per frame drawn at 60 FPS. That's just a bit below 2 megabytes per second, which is between "a lot faster" and "magnitutes above" than any internal or external data connection available at the time.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I had a pentium II laptop sometime in 2001 that could do a neat party trick: you could "fullscreen" a video from but it would play in letterbox at native resolution. So if you played a VHS-resolution it would appear in the middle of the pannel taking up about 1/4th of the space.

I really wish I'd saved that laptop and fixed it rather than dismantling it. Today I can't remember who the mfg even was.

 

[Wappynutter]

Win MPG video converter might do it. Can convert mp4 to vcd, svcd, 3gp etc.. think that's what I used back in the early 2000's to create vcds.

 

[computerdude92]

Hmm... Now that my videos are MPEG1 and MP2 codec'd, what do you think about me trying Adobe Premiere 6.0 to make them even less hardware demanding?

I'll research Win MPG video converter after I get some sleep...

 

[hunterjwizzard]

You could also look at an old program called Auto Gordian Knott. You will need an XP-era machine to run it on. Its what we used for ripping DVDs back in the early 2000s but it had a neat feature: you could tell it how large you wanted the finished video to be, and it would automate all the settings to produce an appropriate file.

I've got another interesting project. I have an old PVR(Personal Video Recorder) from the early 2000s I found while moving. Back in the day I had 2 problems with it: I only owned SD cards in the megabyte range, and I didn't have any easy way to output video to it. Back then I never could manage to encode videos it could plat natively. I recently pulled the battery out(bulging after 20 years) but its a standard battery still being manufactured today.

Sooooo.... I might try and use the silly thing again.

 

[vwestlife]

I had a pentium II laptop sometime in 2001 that could do a neat party trick: you could "fullscreen" a video from but it would play in letterbox at native resolution. So if you played a VHS-resolution it would appear in the middle of the pannel taking up about 1/4th of the space.

That was likely a hardware MPEG decoder piping the video directly into the VESA frame buffer. So all the computer's CPU and software was doing was just leaving a part of the screen blank, to provide a window for the video to be overlaid onto.

Even today, you can tell your computer is using hardware video decoding when you press PrtSc and instead of a frame grab from the video, you just get a black, empty window.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Yup. IBM designed CGA as 32kB of pixels per frame drawn at 60 FPS. That's just a bit below 2 megabytes per second, which is between "a lot faster" and "magnitutes above" than any internal or external data connection available at the time.

Minor correction: CGA is 16Kb. (640x200 monochrome pixels, IE, 128,000 pixels/8 bits per byte = 16,000 bytes.) So strictly speaking you'd "only" have to update a bit under a megabyte per second for a full 60 FPS. Of course, that's still roughly three times as fast as a 4.77mhz 8088 can handle with its fastest memory copy instruction, so it's still thoroughly out of reach of that kind of hardware.

FWIW, the "byte rate" of CGA graphics is around 2Mb/s (14.3mhz pixel clock/8 pixels per byte read = 1.8 megabytes per second*), but that would assume the hardware was actually painting pixels constantly, including inside the horizontal and vertical blanking areas. But it turns out those blanking areas all together add up to almost half the frame time.

(* And, even more confusingly, CGA's *actual* maximum memory bandwidth is close to 4Mb/s, because in 80 column text mode it's fetching *two* bytes per 8 pixels on each scanline. Is that where you got the 32K number? The thing is, though, that's completely disconnected to the number of bytes you'd need to update from the CPU side to update the frame displayed. The worst case there is still 1MB/sec, though, because the card physically only has 16K and thus the highest "hack graphics" screen you can get from text mode is that 160x100x16 mode that occupies, well, 16K total characters + attributes, verses the 4K of the normal 80x25 text mode.)

 

[Zare]

Sure, I was looking from a POV of system's memory map. There's 32kB specified and dedicated to CGA graphics framebuffer reflection in there.

 

[Svenska]

IBM designed CGA as 32kB of pixels per frame drawn at 60 FPS.

Does a standard CGA also have enough bandwidth to rewrite the complete video memory 60 times per second? That would be a major part of the ISA bus bandwidth...

I had a pentium II laptop sometime in 2001 that could do a neat party trick: you could "fullscreen" a video from but it would play in letterbox at native resolution.

That was actually quite common and has more to do with avoiding artifacts generated by non-integer scaling of the content to relatively low-resolution LCD screens. By that time, color space conversion (video is YUV to save data, but the display uses RGB) was already done in hardware and chroma keying was used to compose the video content onto the screen.

I've got a C&T based device with an 800x600 LCD, which uses a non-standard 10x24 pixel font in 80x25 text mode. For other modes (like 640x480), I can choose whether to letterbox (leaving black borders) or upscale (which looks very ugly).