MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs

Post by ddingus » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:06 AM UTC

erickhill wrote: post #51

ddingus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually really fun to see it play so well, and then think back to those times, wonder what would have been possible, what people might say

The catch being the storage solutions employed here would have been impossible to imagine back then. But, perhaps just a 3-5 second video (like some of the gifs on the site) could have made the rounds. Even then they probably wouldn't have fit on a disk! Storage was so tough back then.

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:18 AM UTC

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…

Post by reaperducer » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:30 AM UTC

Post by montroser » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

fstark wrote: post #7

Hi. 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…

Post by anthk » Thu, May 06, 2021, 12:00 PM UTC

II2II wrote: post #33

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.)