I first read “B&W Macs” as meaning “Blue & White Power Mac G3s” and couldn’t figure out why full-motion video would be impressive.
Anyway, this is awesome!
MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#22Ah, full justification for me to now upgrade my Mac Plus with an accelerator board: https://www.micromac.com/products/multispeed.html
Surprised these are still ~$100-200 ... that's a bargain.
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#23Hi. I am the author of macflim. This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube ( https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 ). I'll update the macflim.com website later today. And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100. And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you…
Impressive! That is all really. Makes me wish I had an old Mac.
Had a big grin watching your video.
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#24Hi. I am the author of macflim. This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube ( https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 ). I'll update the macflim.com website later today. And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100. And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you…
THAT is a labor of love!
Kudos!
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats. This is a massive technical feat. Are you going to publish the source, and/or give a technical talk on how all of this is achieved?
Source code of the silent version is at https://github.com/fstark/macflim (Mac app source code, C++ encoder source code and instructions). The sound version (the new demo from yesterday's video https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 is massively more complicated and I will release the binaries over the week-end and the source code later next week, probably). I'd love to do a video with the explanations (or a talk), but I am st…
I really liked this writeup where someone found a way to push an old Kaypro into running their game at a much higher framerate than expected: http://www.chrisfenton.com/dd9-kaypro-edition/
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#26Hi. I am the author of macflim. This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube ( https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 ). I'll update the macflim.com website later today. And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100. And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you…
I love it! (And George Abitbol would be proud of you)
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#27Hi. I am the author of macflim. This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube ( https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 ). I'll update the macflim.com website later today. And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100. And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you…
Super cool!
How are you handling the dithering? The website examples look a bit 'swimmy,' with dots wandering around a lot, but looks a bit better in the bit of the tech talk I looked at. Did you find a nice improvement to the dithering technique?
In both cases, there's lines of dots in wide dark spaces, as one would expect from an error-diffusion dither. Did you look into other approaches?
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#28I’m not sure I understand what’s new here: I remember watching early QuickTime video on my SE30 and marveling that it managed to convert on the fly to dithered B&W.
Still: love to see this!
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#29Hi. I am the author of macflim. This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube ( https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 ). I'll update the macflim.com website later today. And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100. And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you…
Super cool! How are you handling the dithering? The website examples look a bit 'swimmy,' with dots wandering around a lot, but looks a bit better in the bit of the tech talk I looked at. Did you find a nice improvement to the dithering technique? In both cases, there's lines of dots in wide dark spaces, as one would expect from an error-diffusion dither. Did you look into other approaches?
I looked at several approaches, but I absolutely wanted to do floyd-steinberg, as this is what were, for me, "realistic" images on my Mac back in the 80s.
The example on the website are identical to the ones in the first video, as the simple looping gif is a by-product of the encoding.
On the second video (the one with sound), you cannot compare, as the video is compressed and not all the parts of the image are updated. But the algo is the same.
The swimmy bits come from the fact that I encode images using the preceeding one, and use the pixels from the preceeding images to "control" where the error gets diffused, to try to get some temporal stability in error diffusion (I have a long blog post that explains that, but I never got around finishing it, it seems people were more interested by having me coding sound).
I am not completely sure why the swim effect seems to always be in the north-west direction (I understand why pixels go in that diagonal, but no why they always seem to crawl on the top-left, and never the bottom-right).
The dithering code can be found in the encoder, on github:
https://github.com/fstark/macflim/blob/main/flimmaker.cpp#L3...
If you have other dithering ideas, let me know. I am happy with the one I have, which matches what I was looking for, but we never know. Also, for the compressed version (the one with sound), the dithering have a huge impact on the ability to play on slow machines.
(Btw, I tried ordered dithering, but I have always found it awful looking. Maybe in motion it would fare better?).
Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
#30Hi. I am the author of macflim. This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube ( https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0 ). I'll update the macflim.com website later today. And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100. And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you…
I love it! (And George Abitbol would be proud of you)
As long as I avoid flim about cyclimse, everything should be ok.