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old video formats for pentium 1

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Reply 20 of 86, by Scali

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ratco wrote:

3. Codecs that can be played using Pentium or 486 (I doubt a 386 can play movies). Although I have seen a 286 playing a fullscreen video on youtube (custom software made and it was not really all that great).

Even an 4.77 MHz 8088 with CGA can play movies, with the right software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdG413nNkI
It's all about finding an acceptable balance between image/sound quality, framerate, resolution, filesize and processing requirements.

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Reply 21 of 86, by elianda

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A 486DX2-66 can play MPEG1 in VCD bitrate/resolution (nearly) fine at 256 colors. So MPEG1 should be no problem for a Pentium.
MPEG2 in PAL resolution however requires already a P2 300 MHz or similar. So I would go for MPEG1.
I have used a workflow with TMPEGENC to convert latest game trailers to MPEG1 (as linked by me before).
The same videos play very well on a Pentium (video shows on a 486DX2-66 with accelerator).

Compared to the very sophisticated custom implementations on very slow PCs MPEG1 follows a broad standard.
Also noteworthy is that the later Pentium boards feature bus master PCI transfers by default for loading from HDD that helps streaming video a lot. With older systems one had to go with SCSI.

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Reply 22 of 86, by Jo22

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Scali wrote:

It's all about finding an acceptable balance between image/sound quality, framerate, resolution, filesize and processing requirements.

Absolutely, it's a challenge to find the right balace. I do have a little MPEG player with SD/CF slots and video conversion is a bit tricky.
If the compression is too high, it will stutter or loose sync (because the player is too weak to handle the strong compression).
If the compression is too low, it can't read the data from flash card fast enough and it will stutter again (because the transfer speed is too low and there's more MB/s to read).

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Reply 24 of 86, by ratco

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Hey guys.

So, here are some recent tests I made.
Using only DOS you can actually download a video from youtube and watch it in a Pentium 1. You just have to use www.keepvid.com and, using Links, download the video you want in "3GP" quality, you can pick either 144 or 240. The trick is that you save it with the extension "mp4". Quickview will play the file just fine. File will have a mix of divx and aac.
In my machine, I got these results:

1. "preload sound" "grayscale" "no scaling", the video will play in full screen (800x600) with proper framerate. Of course, you lose a bit of detail, due to resolution and lack of color, but the video plays nice, and the image is big enough to be enjoyable.
2. "preload sound" "8 color bits" "no scaling", the video will play in full screen (800x600) with proper framerate. BUT the image is shitty, the low amount of color will make it look pretty bad and I would rather watch it in B&W.
3. "preload sound" "hicolor" "no scaling", the video will now play in it's real size (very small) with proper framerate. Looks good, but small. Some videos won't play image, and I had to choose "TrueColor" instead.
4. "preload sound" "hicolor" "2x zoom", video will be bigger and color will be good, but the framerate is wrong (drops many frames) and sound gets out of sync. Don't like it. However, if the video is 144p, I get it to play ok using "preload sound" "hicolor" "software full screen". However it plays at 640x480. Still, the best I got to use with color in big picture.

So, I can get a totally fine framerate and fullscreen picture if using grayscale in a 240p video, or a 640x480 Hi color video with proper framerate. All in all, very good considering I was doing it with a Pentium 1. Back in the day when divx appeared I was told that "no that machine won't play movies". Indeed, people who wanted to watch a movie (using windows and all the codecs of the time) needed a pentium 2 with MMX. Funny how future brings back old technologies.

I am actually very pleased with the results, and I can do it all in DOS, which was the objective. I have cheated by using Linux with Links (linux version) to download the test video files (don't have internet in old pc). But I expect the same to work in pure DOS.

How about someone tries it out in a 486 66/33 ? Would love to hear the results! 😀

Reply 25 of 86, by keenmaster486

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You know, I got full motion 640x480 24fps high-color video working on my Pentium MMX/166 laptop a few months ago.

Can't remember how I did it though. Seems to me I tricked around with MPEG settings on HandBrake until it would play right.

Also, like I mentioned above, I seem to remember using some other program than QV since it sharps all the music.

Edit: I'll see if I can pull out my laptop sometime this week and reverse engineer my process 🤣

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 26 of 86, by ratco

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I don't notice qv playing the sound wrong.

However, I have tried with these programs suggested here to get full screen without hurting performance, but it doesn't seem to work : Toshiba Tecra 720CDT = Great DOS Gaming Laptop
Image always gets distorted or maximum of 640x480.
Also, I noticed two things:

1. It seems to load faster from usb drive than hard disk. Hard disk seems to have a pause every few seconds. My usb is 1.0 or 1.1 (not sure) and loads pretty well. I wish I still had my old PCMCIA usb 2.0 card. That would give best results.
2. A 15 mins video will get some "lag" after the first 10 mins or so. By the end of the video, video starts droping frames and sound get's a little bit out of sync. I noticed this while playing a 240p video in fullscreen grayscale (using the method described above).

I might try using a RAM drive and loading the file from there. Should be faster and (hopefully) not have lag at the end of the video. If it does, it's a problem with the way quickview handles memory, and there is not much I can do 🙁

On other news, I tried getting a subtitle file to play with these videos, and couldn't get it to work. I suppose subtitles only work with AVI files (divx). Probably it uses the AVI index to time the subtitle. MP4 doesn't have that luxury.

Still I am amazed at how much this computer surprises me. I have played 3d games on it, I have now mp4 videos playing in full screen in DOS. If I had known how to do it all 10 years ago I would have been using it to this day 😜 Good thing I didn't know, I love my linux computer ahah.

Reply 27 of 86, by ratco

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Anyone has tried anything new about this?
keenmaster486, any news on your end?

Also, if anyone can be bothered I would like to hear from your experiences on using quickview in a pentium or a 486.

Thanks.

Reply 28 of 86, by emosun

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Downloading youtube videos at 144p and 240p is a worse method than what I'm already doing. I'm not sure why you would persue that method.

I download them in 720 and convert them to 480x360 and it looks a lot better than youtube at 240p.

Also i think people are mixing up the SCREEN resolution and VIDEO resolution. The video's I'm playing back are at 300-360p but the screen resolution 1680x1050.

Reply 29 of 86, by computergeek92

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I never tried playing modern-ish video on anything pre-Pentium III. On a Pentium 1, I would think it would primarily have to do with how good the video card is.

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Reply 30 of 86, by emosun

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computergeek92 wrote:

I never tried playing modern-ish video on anything pre-Pentium III. On a Pentium 1, I would think it would primarily have to do with how good the video card is.

Well it seems that most video cards that have at least 4 or more mb can playback pretty much anything and the real bottleneck is the pentium 1 itself. Being that the cpu has to do all the work loading and unloading the system ram with information quickly.

From my tests the cpu can handle about 1200kbps of video information when going over 300p. If you stick with 284p however it can go up to 2000kbps. There's also a massive correlation between performance , and using resolutions divisible by two.

For example , if I rendered the video at 283p , the performance is terrible vs 284p. It would seem that scaleing an odd number is very hard for the cpu to do vs even numbers.

Reply 31 of 86, by Scali

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emosun wrote:

Well it seems that most video cards that have at least 4 or more mb can playback pretty much anything and the real bottleneck is the pentium 1 itself. Being that the cpu has to do all the work loading and unloading the system ram with information quickly.

I disagree.
In the Pentum 1-age there were already video cards that had certain acceleration for video playing. Eg on-the-fly YUY2->RGB conversion, hardware upscaling (sometimes even with bilinear filtering), and such. This could greatly reduce the CPU load and/or improve quality and resolution.
There were also dedicated MPEG decoding cards available, which did all the hard work, so the CPU didn't really matter.
So it really depends on what kind of video card you have (and of course you need a player that acutally supports the functionality of your card).

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Reply 32 of 86, by emosun

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Scali wrote:
I disagree. In the Pentum 1-age there were already video cards that had certain acceleration for video playing. Eg on-the-fly YU […]
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emosun wrote:

Well it seems that most video cards that have at least 4 or more mb can playback pretty much anything and the real bottleneck is the pentium 1 itself. Being that the cpu has to do all the work loading and unloading the system ram with information quickly.

I disagree.
In the Pentum 1-age there were already video cards that had certain acceleration for video playing. Eg on-the-fly YUY2->RGB conversion, hardware upscaling (sometimes even with bilinear filtering), and such. This could greatly reduce the CPU load and/or improve quality and resolution.
There were also dedicated MPEG decoding cards available, which did all the hard work, so the CPU didn't really matter.
So it really depends on what kind of video card you have (and of course you need a player that acutally supports the functionality of your card).

It's using a radeon 8500, and the player is wmp 7.

Normally you'd think i'd use MPC or VLC but it's actually more laggy than just using wmp 7.

Keep in mind the system isn't using SD ram or and agp gpu. It's just edo and pci. The board also has no l2 cache. Course I've been running the same tests on a 233mhz pentium 2 and even with l2 cache and better features it also is just about at it's limit with maybe about 10% more speed than the 233mhz pentium 1.

Now on the gateway destination I have , it can essentially play anything back via it's video inputs at 480 60hz. However the cpu is TRULY not in use as the gpu directly forwards the signal to the screen and never enters the ram. I recently saw the guy who worked on the software for the destination talk about how the cpu wasn't really fast enough to move a lot of information like that through it. So the machine could never actually capture footage.

Reply 33 of 86, by yawetaG

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emosun wrote:

Now on the gateway destination I have , it can essentially play anything back via it's video inputs at 480 60hz. However the cpu is TRULY not in use as the gpu directly forwards the signal to the screen and never enters the ram. I recently saw the guy who worked on the software for the destination talk about how the cpu wasn't really fast enough to move a lot of information like that through it. So the machine could never actually capture footage.

Yes, that's why back in the day there were dedicated professional video capture cards that did the processing instead of depending on the CPU for processing. These date back to long before late Pentium I systems. I have a folder from 1994 here that shows several ISA cards for 486 systems, including one that promises a resolution of 1024x768. That kind of solution is what Scali is alluding to.

For example, the Miro Video DC1 allows hard disk editing of video. Google Groups thread.

Reply 34 of 86, by emosun

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Well that's great but we're getting off topic here. I'm more interested in the various file formats available at the time and the info so far is pretty good lots of neat file types to consider.

What i'd really like is a file type that can sacrifice color depth for resolution or bandwidth. When i render with animated gifs I can essentially make the gif black and white and halve the file size of the gif. i can then in turn add more FPS or resolution to the gif to make up for it. Be neat to see what video file types work similarly to that. As I've been working with mpeg 1 I've tried reducing color depths even down to monochrone or 16 colors and it has no effect on file size or performance. The only thing that really effects file size/performance seems to be bitrate and FPS. and or maybe there a format that runs better when interlaced as only half the image is rendered at a time vs the whole image , i know mpeg 1 doesnt support interlaced footage.

Reply 35 of 86, by Scali

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emosun wrote:

It's using a radeon 8500, and the player is wmp 7.

Radeon 8500 is not exactly Pentium 1-era is it? 😀
By the time the Radeon 8500 arrived, a lot of MPEG decoding steps were already done on the video card. In fact, excellent video playback was one of the selling points of ATi cards at the time, with the Radeon 8500 featuring their "Video Immersion II" technology for accelerating MPEG-2 decoding for DVD replay: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce3- … tack,354-6.html
Try replacing the Radeon 8500 with a 'Pentium 1-era' card like the S3 Trio64, and you'll probably notice a considerable drop in performance on video replay.

emosun wrote:

Normally you'd think i'd use MPC or VLC but it's actually more laggy than just using wmp 7.

WMP uses the standardized DirectShow framework for video replay. ATi's drivers include standard codec plugins for DirectShow, so WMP is always a good choice for using the video card's built-in acceleration.
In the Pentium-1 era however, this technology was not yet widespread yet (in fact, DirectShow didn't exist yet, we still were using its predecessor ActiveMovie), so it was more difficult to find the right players and codecs to get your card working to the best of its ability. However, usually specific software was included. Eg, my Matrox came with SoftPEG at the time, which did the job.

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Reply 36 of 86, by yawetaG

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emosun wrote:

Well that's great but we're getting off topic here. I'm more interested in the various file formats available at the time and the info so far is pretty good lots of neat file types to consider.

In that case, you should consider such cards, as they may support specific file types not found in more generally available software packages. Furthermore, I fail to see how it is off-topic, as the Pentium I era starts right at the Pentium 60, when such cards still were a serious option if you wanted to work with video and not suffer from horrible performance (SCSI hard disks and lots of RAM helped too).

But well, if taking a Pentium I CPU and combining it with much newer hardware is your thing, that's fine too, whatever floats your boat, but it ain't period correct from a purist point of view, IMHO.

Of course, back in the day, real professional video work usually was done on dedicated workstations...

Reply 38 of 86, by emosun

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leileilol wrote:
Cinepak is one. The videos on the Win95 cd used Cinepak and 22KHz ADPCM iirc. […]
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Cinepak is one. The videos on the Win95 cd used Cinepak and 22KHz ADPCM iirc.

ffmpeg can encode videos to an appropriate format for a stock win95 box (this being a .bat file for a SendTo operation)

ffmpeg.exe -i %1 -r 15 -s 320x240 -ar 22050 -acodec adpcm_ms -vcodec cinepak %1.avi

dunno what -r 24 and -s 480x360 cinepak would do for classic pentium specs though. also note that ffmpeg's cinepak encoder is slowwwwwwwww. sounds like a possible phil chart project to find the most efficient codec/fps/size for each old cpu. MP3 is definitely off the table for sound. Similarly, MPEG4 codecs are all P2 territory at the minimum (including the ye old DivX 😉 3.11)

ok just gave .mov a try and used the cinepak codec (as it says in premiere at least)

it would appear .mov does exactly what I want but with a catch. I can export videos in 8 , 16, and 24 bit color which in turn frees up resources for resolution. However , it seems cinepak has a limit to it's quality and even when exporting video at 480p , they still end up being 264p with way too much compression. When I export using different codecs such as h.263 , this DOES make the video at 480p and 24 bit color , and it can play back on the pentium 1. However , the file size is 500mb per every 2 minutes thus making the clip play perfectly for a bit then lag as the system ram is only 96mb and has to reload the next 30 seconds of video.

I feel as though .mov could work if cinepak had higher limits , or if the files sizes where smaller. mpeg 1 however seems to (in the short term) be working better in terms of overall size and quality.

Reply 39 of 86, by emosun

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Scali wrote:
emosun wrote:

Try replacing the Radeon 8500 with a 'Pentium 1-era' card like the S3 Trio64, and you'll probably notice a considerable drop in performance on video replay.

The boards integrated gpu is a 2mb s3 virge which has the same exact results as the 8500. I actually just now took the 8500 out to make sure the virge still performed the same and it does.

The only reason i use the 8500 is because it can output the correct resolution to my monitor over dvi. Otherwise the virge only outputs 32bit color at 640x480 which is awful. But as stated earlier the cpu is whats under load not the gpu.