BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-03, 23:13:

Come to think of it, because TV capture cards did only 320x240 or something, I think I could watch vidcap TV and VCRtape stuff in DivX on the K6-2-450 machine with V3. But DVD quality divX was too much until I got an Athlon XP.

Seems like the most advanced codec for 9x was a flavor of divx.

A lot of video compression codecs were still under an ideotic copyright at that time making it somewhat frustrating to support all the playback codecs without resorting to some form of piracy at the time which just seemed extremely boneheaded when you just wanted a simple lightweight player but had to use multiple if you didn’t have the codec from some other program

First thing you should do is use Fdformat and / or 2M / 2MGUI to increase the floppy disk capacity from 1.44M to 1.8M - 2M. Then quality of your video will be that much better, since you've just increased your floppy disk capacity 30-40%.

Good old X codec pack has X265 and runs in 98. And low bitrate/low resolution X265 is no problem for slower computers.

I have an old TV card I used to use in exactly the same way.

3PG was H.263
That should make it fit a floppy disk.

For all you folks keeping score at home, I've gone with h264, 12 bit 128x96 for the video and 12 bit mono Opus for the audio, which left me with plenty of spare space on the floppy disk for more errr stuff. Anyway, I'll give you the details in a new thread later 😉

Just my two cents: floppies are very slow: it would take about a minute to read a whole floppy, but a 4-minute movie should be playable from a floppy in real-time. 😀

I found Microsoft's mpeg4 subset msmpeg4v3 to have excellent quality to size ratio and still be playable on a lot of vintage hardware. It might not provide the best quality to compression ratio, but it is the best I've found that is also the most compatible with generic Windows Media Player codecs out of the box.

I’ve heard AV1 is good at compression (unless it’s too new, I’m not sure). I’m currently trying to fit a movie on 2 1.72mb floppies, but that’s for a 66mhz machine. I’ve managed to squeeze half of Blade Runner without sound! But it looks abysmal…

Edit: shoot, just read the no AV1 requirement 😬 ignore me

Yeah, you can do some pretty spectacular video compression, but audio is always going to take a sizeable chunk.

Maybe some telephone quality audio is 'useful'; 0.3 - 3 kHz. Not sure if G.711 (PCMU/A) is still too large.

My video project is finished (for now?). You can watch the end product here: My band's music (video) on a floppy disk