A good place to start would be this thread with someone attempting to something similar on early Pentium. I don't remember the entire thread, but there's a lot of interesting information there.

Check this out as well, Standard Def Steve tested MPEG1 on a P100 among many many other things.

I read the first thread, but it is mostly really about pentium pcs and mpeg. SMK is also mentioned also smackpy(?) I don't know it.
But mostly both are about mpeg or newer formats.
The list of Standard Def Steve is really a great work. But a 486 is just mentioned once running Win95 and testing the mpeg-1 standard (running really slow at 100% CPU).
Because of that fact I've got a MPEG card in my PC and that's why I would like to know about different standards, playable in DOS and with a 486.

But thanks for pointing to the threads 😀

Have you tried the Motion Pixels codec? It's mentioned in that big thread.

Nope, not right now, because I thought there was just a Win 3.x player.
I will take a look at the files. There is written, that there are only the player, but maybe there is a little bit more in the archives.
Could work, if the right files are there.

For a 486 you want to use cinepak .mov files .

I spent months playing with all kinds of video formats for my 40mhz 486 with no mpeg acceleration and 8mb of ram and cinepak with .mov works very well. Use media player and not quicktime to play then back. Keep the bitrate low. Under 1000kbps. The bitrate limitations are cpu based not drive or ram related.

The resolution must be the same ratio as the monitor. So if your display is 640x480 then it must be an easy 4:3 multiple like 320x240 or 160x120. This is because the machine will have a very tough time generating the black bars for the areas on the screen that dont have video information.

Also 24 to 30 fps video will look worse as its trying to fit 30 frames into 1000kbps so each frame will look very compressed. Use 12.5 to 15fps to keep the video quality looking decent.

Pro tip. Cartoons can be rendered out at lower fps without looking very different from the originals. For example the simpsons is actually animated at 12 fps so you can export an episode at a lower rate without much difference.

Using these methods ive exported episodes of anime plus rick and morty episodes that run on my 486 pretty well.

As for audio. Well I havent mastered that yet. Audio requires more biterate. Which hurts either the visual quality, or you have to bump up the bitrate which maxes the cpu. An audio card wont offload the cpu. The cpu still has to process the data in the file. So good luck with that.

How did you converted the video or generated it?
Do you know a way to play cinepak movies in DOS? And if possible: is there source code available or c/c++ header with libraries?
Have you some examples, regarding the output quality?
I don't mind playing it at 10-15 fps, if just the quality is okay 😉

Cinepak is probably a good one for older CPUs, or Microsoft Video-1 (faster but worse compression?). There are some shareware DOS programs that can play AVI like QuickView Pro and SEA. Encoding a video is easy on newer Windows by using VirtualDub or AVIdemux. On DOS I'm not sure, maybe a DOS port of FFMPEG would work.

Karm wrote:

How did you converted the video or generated it?

I render everything in premiere so i can have control over exact bitrate , file size , aspect ratio ect....

Karm wrote:

Do you know a way to play cinepak movies in DOS? And if possible: is there source code available or c/c++ header with libraries?

no idea. i dont use dos for anything at all.

Karm wrote:

Have you some examples, regarding the output quality?

if you are looking for quality you are going to be very disapointed.

486 machines and early pentiums were JUST before the revolution of mpeg video. once every off the shelf machine started to come with mpeg decoders built into the hardware 320x240 video at 30fps was very easy to do. thus "vhs" like video was much easier.On 486 machines with no acceleration of any kind , you will essentially get "sega cd" quality levels.

im not at home so i can't fire up the 486 and show you how the episode ports look but i'd say they are watchable.

the only video i have of the machine was before i started working with cinepak and was using microsoft video 1 which was a pretty crappy codec that didnt work as well as cinepak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3nZ7TduOI0

one thing to note. if you squish a 16:9 video into a 4:3 frame , then run a 16:9 monitor at a 4:3 resolution on the machine...... you can have the 486 output 16:9 video at the correct aspect ratio which is what i did in the video. 🤣

emosun wrote:

one thing to note. if you squish a 16:9 video into a 4:3 frame , then run a 16:9 monitor at a 4:3 resolution on the machine...... you can have the 486 output 16:9 video at the correct aspect ratio which is what i did in the video. 🤣

Poor man's anamorphic widescreen! 🤣
You could also reduce vertical height on your old school analog CRT display as a low tech solution. 😜

There's also IBM's Ultimotion codec. It was made for software decoding on OS/2, but got a Windows 3.1 driver, as well.
Search for umspec.zip and um4win.zip for more information. There also were a few sample videos, but i forgot where they are.