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MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

macflim.com

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Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#31

Post by dunnevens »

gcanyon wrote: post #28

I’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!

Maybe the difference is smooth full screen playback? I remember the early QT too, and used it on my old LC. Playback was mostly ok (15 fps or so) at 320x240 (think that was the resolution) but would strain if I increased the size.

Memories are a bit weak, so I might be misremembering some of this. But I do clearly remember full screen videos dropping a ton of frames. I used to put full screen videos up when I had parties (computer video was still a novelty and it made for a nice backdrop as people danced/drank) and it was 5 fps at best on that poor underpowered machine.

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#33

Post by II2II »

glhaynes wrote: post #21

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!

Because full motion video can be impressive on a Power Mac G3. I recall downloading a video from Apple's website soon after the introduction of the G4. Of course I still had a G3. The G3 struggled to play the video at a couple of frames per second. (In retrospect, the video was intended as a technology demonstration of codec quality and performance on the G4.)

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#34

Post by OnlyMortal »

fstark wrote: post #29
sdenton4 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 updat…

Floyd-Steinberg was usually the better choice for rendering an image.

It might be an option to offer Ordered by a menu option?

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#35

Post by fstark »

gcanyon wrote: post #28

I’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!

Are you sure?

I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that Quicktime on a SE/30 was not able to display fullscreen videos at 24 fps. Also, the dithering used in QuickTime was an ordered dithering, which IMO is pretty ugly and eats details.

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#36

Post by [deleted] »

fstark wrote: post #29
sdenton4 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 updat…

[deleted]

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#37

Post by fstark »

OnlyMortal wrote: post #34
fstark wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 updat…

Floyd-Steinberg was usually the better choice for rendering an image. It might be an option to offer Ordered by a menu option?

The dithering is performed by the C++ linux encoder. I could add it as an encoding stage option...

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#38

Post by JKCalhoun »

fstark wrote: post #29
sdenton4 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 updat…

You made the right call.

I think there should be a clipping of the lower-grayscale coming into your filter. A black-point cut-off.

I think that would get rid of most of the "swimming pixels" in the very dark areas (would become completely black areas).

Some loss of detail of course in the dark areas ... but what details was there anyway?

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#39

Post by fstark »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #38
fstark wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 updat…

You made the right call. I think there should be a clipping of the lower-grayscale coming into your filter. A black-point cut-off. I think that would get rid of most of the "swimming pixels" in the very dark areas (would become completely black areas). Some loss of detail of course in the dark areas ... but what details was there anyway?

Interesting. I tried some light posterization (splitting into discrete levels), but it made the image uglier. Your approach would make nice blacks and whites. Grays would still suffer, but it is an interesting take.

Re: MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

#40

Post by fstark »

mmphosis wrote: post #32

Full motion Double High Res video playback on the Apple IIe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tHenz0oU-4

Yes. This is absolutely insane, with image encoded into 6502 machine code, and PWM sound interleaced. It doesn't work on period hardware, thought (needs a special modern card, the CFFA3000, that is out of production).

I thought that this particular video, using the 1984 ad I used, was a reply to my earlier macflim video :-)

That red skirt made me feel like Constable against Turner... https://www.brightreddot.org/objective/ ...

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