My target machine is A2286/8Mhz ET4000 256colors SBpro compatible 220/I7/D1. I do not have to worry about Diskspace. 4x2GB on CF-Card.
I linked a YT-video from a guy that uses a self-written player in basic (don'r know what basic he used) to play converted beavis&buthead videos on his 286/10? in color with sound!

That is what I am thinking of..."cartoon contend" should look OK in lowres on 256colors.

It's all about performance of the player and the format that is used. So the goal is to get the best picture and the best sound-output with the highest framerate possible.

I downloaded a video that can be played on my target machine...it's some sort of japanese manga content intro video.
It looks OK but it's fast-moving content and it has no sound and consists of a ".bin" file with a strange "player" named sort of"3iv?.exe".
I will have a look and take a photo of it. This is indeed OK, but I would love to have sound as well.

Thx for that advice.... I have several Macs and therefore can produce MP4 content out of DVD's.
FFMPEG should be supported on mac too. What would be your advice to transcode from DVD.

I think the best way would be not creating MP4 content out of the DVD-Episode and then use FFMPEG to generate the final file.
That would be like making a 320Kbit AAC out of a CD and after that making a 64KB/mp3 out of that AAC.

What would be the settings you would reccomend for FFMPEG for a direct transcode from the DVD-Episode-Content?

I don't think about playing those files within windows...that would be way to much overhead....I am thinking about a playing Videos in DOS. So no WFW here.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-03-30, 09:08:

Thx for that advice.... I have several Macs and therefore can produce MP4 content out of DVD's. FFMPEG should be supported on ma […]
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Thx for that advice.... I have several Macs and therefore can produce MP4 content out of DVD's.
FFMPEG should be supported on mac too. What would be your advice to transcode from DVD.

I think the best way would be not creating MP4 content out of the DVD-Episode and then use FFMPEG to generate the final file.
That would be like making a 320Kbit AAC out of a CD and after that making a 64KB/mp3 out of that AAC.

What would be the settings you would reccomend for FFMPEG for a direct transcode from the DVD-Episode-Content?

I don't think about playing those files within windows...that would be way to much overhead....I am thinking about a playing Videos in DOS. So no WFW here.

Trying to figure this out - I have tried to transcode from MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 sources, but the only thing holding me back is that FFMPEG's Microsoft Video 1 encoder. The encoder won't even encode in the RGB8 pixel format, only RGB555LE (16 bit color). It will generate a 256 color palette from a video just fine and use it, but it will still be in the wrong pixel format and show up as 16 bit color on any media player. The way it encodes MSV1 doesn't seem to be readable by QuickTime either. It would really be nice to use FFMPEG as it can palletize videos better than VirtualDub can and handle modern input codecs. There might be a intermediary codec I can transcode to that would allow me to load it in another software and encode it as MSV1 but I can't find one on FFMPEG that supports 8 bit color besides rawvideo, which I can't get any player to read (assuming it's missing a proper file header). Maybe I am doing this wrong because it has been such a long time since I have done this, but I believe I gave up on FFMPEG back then for similar reasons. The best option now would probably be to use an older software, but finding something that works in Windows 10, which is preferable, and can support semi-modern codecs might be a little bit difficult. As stated before somewhere else on VOGONS (I think by Radiounix), the encoders likely moved away from 8 bit color by 1995 when most PC's could handle 16 bit color anyways. Adobe Premiere 6.5 works, but it doesn't quite give me the performance I want it to - I've seen better done with MSV1. Here's my basic FFMPEG command i've been toying with. Like I said, I don't know if I'm doing this right, but this is what i've been able to figure out.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -r 15 -s 160x120 -ar 11025 -c:a pcm_u8 -filter_complex "[0:v] split [a];[a] palettegen [p];[p] paletteuse" -pix_fmt rgb8 -c:v msvideo1 output.avi

If someone can provide their input on this and help us figure out how we can achieve better 256 color MSV1 video encoding on a modern PC, i'd greatly appreciate it.

Whatabout if you grab some real old versions from an old Simtel archive?? Mid 90s there was stuff around, though transcoding took forever on my 5x86 just to get a few seconds that would play on my 386SL20 notebook.

For animation work on the Amiga Dpaint IV was popular, and it supported several non or lightly compressed animation formats that the low power Amigas could play back full speed, FLVs were the most similar PC format I think though. Dpaint for PC was given away on several coverdisks in the later 90s. IIRC Autodesk animator used to be the tool of choice for banging out tron type FMV stuff.

Windows graphical environment with Multimedia Extension 1.0 (aka Win 3 MME) shipped with a video/animation codec..
The animations used *.MMM file extension, format is unknown.
http://toastytech.com/guis/win3mme.html

This thing works on A2286/8 ET4000 bu8t has no sound.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:56:

This thing works on A2286/8 ET4000 bu8t has no sound.

No compression at all 😀

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:56:

This thing works on A2286/8 ET4000 bu8t has no sound.

Wow, Mina from Densha Otoko! That's more than 17 years ago...... 😿

vstrakh wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:59:

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:56:

This thing works on A2286/8 ET4000 bu8t has no sound.

No compression at all 😀

heh, "all" you would have needed on your 1987 FAT12 286 system was three $800 100MB SCSI drives, with 32MB partitions and split it up into 7 sections....

Space is not the problem on my setup...I have 4x2GB total and 3x2GB free 😉

PC-MOS/386 could have had supported 512 MB partitions on such a system. 😀

Btw, there was a video game console based on a 286+Windows 3.1.
It supported multimedia, too. Interactive games, multimedia encyclopediae..
So the 286 was up to the task, no question.

Cool, but my 286 is low end, only 8Mhz intead of 20.

I found out that the IBM Ultimotion driver for Video for Windows does work on a 286, but none of the 16 bit color sample videos play. They show up as a black window,and when you press play, they run for the duration as a black screen or just crash if it's a longer video. Does anyone have a 256 color sample or a Ultimotion encoder? I'd like to experiment with this codec further.

In regards to .MMM, i've seen the format on Win 3.0 MM. Did .MMM support audio? I remember it being similar to Powerpoint animations. Probably not a good substitute for motion video codecs but still cool in its own right.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:56:

This thing works on A2286/8 ET4000 bu8t has no sound.

Very curious about this program, could you please provide a copy of it? I'd like to analyze it.

Please have a look.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-03, 15:45:

Please have a look.

Does that have the video file as well? I can't look at it now but i'll have a look tommorow.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-03, 05:02:

Cool, but my 286 is low end, only 8Mhz intead of 20.

No problem, 20 MHz is overkill, anyway.

The Tandy VIS had a 12 MHz 80286 and zero wait states..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Video_Information_System
Edit: ISA bus can be run at 12 MHz, too, depending on the components used.

The original MPC Level 1 spec had a 286, too, before it got revised.
And it didn't need a 20 MHz version, either.

Show that those "stubborn" guys who still think that a 286 shouldn't deserve a 16-Bit sound card & CD-ROM drive! 😁

Edit: Stubborn in quotation marks, of course. 😀

I think one of the reasons why people believe the 286 is generally a poor performer is because of the limited graphics drivers in Standard Mode Windows.

Apparently, only a few manufacturers optimized their Standard Mode drivers, if they provided any, at all.
They rather spent their energy in high performance 32-Bit VXDs for 386 Enhanced-Mode, along with DCI support.

It seems to me that the 286 compatible 16-Bit drivers were merely seen as a fall-back and used a different,
safer method for accesing SVGA framebuffer (banked vs linear).
However, a few Standard Mode drivers were capable of providing good performance.

Linear framebuffer in Standard Mode was at least possible, it seems :
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/win16-retro-development/

I'm speaking under correction, but I think the 15-16 MB region would have been accessible by VGA cards on ISA bus/286 PCs for that purpose.

And on plain DOS.. The 286 was pretty much neglected by coders/the cool kids in the early 90s.
At the time, 486 PCs with VLB graphics were what they cared for. 32-Bit and "flat mode" who-ooh!
All in all, Windows 3.1 or PC/GEOS did utilize the 16-Bit architecture much better, I suppose.

Because as solid work horses, the 286 ATs were still being respected.
That's why business software, including Windows 3 and GEOS, - both 16-Bit -, had proper support for it, still.

Whereas 286 or 16-Bit PCs in general were seen as obsolete/boring among gam.. computer game players,
they still were useful as office machines and little CAD/DTP workstations etc.
Too precious to be universally being thrown out yet, due their existing compatibility to Windows & GEOS. Or vice versa.

That's at least how I felt about the situation in the 90s.
Windows 3.1x was the last stand of the 16-Bit era, the 286's last sanctuary. The remainings of the 16-Bit era.

Since many development tools used for writing Windows 95 applications were still 16-Bit versions in reality, they produced Windows 3.1x compatible NE applications.

Without even their developers really noticing.
They simply kept using their existing tools, like VB3, dBFast or Visual FoxPro.
And then, after finishing their work, slapped a "for Windows 95" sticker onto the box.

This was different to the DOS programming scene, in which programmers started to optimize their programs.
Not immediately, maybe, but as time went by, 32-Bit 386 instructions sneaked into the code bases, at least.
Due to the absence of hardware abstraction this was much more relevant likely
(Windows has drivers that are optimized and either 16 or 32 Bit, whenever needed).

Edit: Sorry got the long text, I was just thinking out loud. Hope you don't mind.

I asked a similar question on stack exchange recently, although targeting a 386: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ques … rmats-for-a-386

Still not seeing a definitive answer unfortunately. The constraint for most retro PCs nowadays is not disk space (due to XT-IDE etc), but CPU horsepower (and possibly RAM).

It would be amazing to have a table of CPU speeds (and generation) with acceptable resolution videos, incl player software and FFMPEG command, so we could dial in the settings to convert any video to our target system. A man can dream...

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-04-02, 14:25:

vstrakh wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:59:

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:56:

This thing works on A2286/8 ET4000 bu8t has no sound.

No compression at all 😀

heh, "all" you would have needed on your 1987 FAT12 286 system was three $800 100MB SCSI drives, with 32MB partitions and split it up into 7 sections....

There was some more discussion about this on VCF forum where I posted it originally, but it actually does use compression. There are 536 frames so if it were uncompressed then at 64000 bytes per frame it would be ~34MB. The problem is that an 8MHz 286 doesn't have many CPU cycles available for a better decompression...

I asked a similar question on stack exchange recently, although targeting a 386: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ques … rmats-for-a-386

That's funny because I saw your stackexchange question when it posted and tried to comment but stackexchange started hitting me with captchas and I abandoned the site instead, 🤣. What I was going to say is that I have some video clips that I played on my 16MHz 486 at the time, and these were the specs:
320x240 7fps Cinepak
160x120 15fps Indeo 3.2
Probably would work on your 386.

I converted the Big Buck Bunny ( open movie project ) mp4 file to Cinepac using ffmpeg then I used the VidEdit tool that comes with Video for Windows on an NT 3.5.1 host to convert it down to MSVIDEO1. Here is the result:
https://youtu.be/WgZEJc6xGjQ
Big Buck Bunny on a 286.

I need something for VGA Dos for 286/8Mhz.