Foone🏳️⚧️
foone@digipres.club
ooh. I should build a portable floppy-video player!
like, imagine you're a kid in foone's weird alternate 1997, and you've got a portable disk player for your family's aerostar minivan: you and your sibling, watching your favorite TV shows, loading every couple minutes off another 3.5" floppy disk.
4
0
0
Cursed Silicon
CursedSilicon@social.restless.systems@foone Only if you slam them in one after the other like Yugioh duelists
1
0
0
1
0
0
@haematophage h264 (I think? I can't remember which codec I used) and a RECKLESS disregard for output quality.
I'm aiming for "is it at least not actively painful to watch? then it's good enough. lower the framerate, resize it smaller, make the audio shittier"
0
0
0
monotonehell 🏳️🌈🇦🇺 (Andrew)
monotonehell@aus.social@foone cursed. Back in 1990 I digitised Ratcat's That Ain't Bad over three Double Density 3.5" disks that auto played on an Amiga 500 you had to change floppies as it went.
1
0
0
Foone🏳️⚧️
foone@digipres.club@monotonehell neat! that's basically what I'm doing here: I compressed a video down small, and I'm working on a player that can play a video on multiple floppies with prompting you to switch disks as needed.
1
0
0
Scott VE3QBZ
scott@mastodon.clitheroe.ca@foone @monotonehell Needs like a bar graph gauge of how much buffer is remaining, so you have something to fixate on as you fumble for the next floppy.
1
0
0
@scott @monotonehell good idea! might be tricky with how my system works but I'll definitely try
0
0
0
@foone would you have hard plastic organizers or pleather albums for storage? 1 container=1 20-30 min chapter
1
0
0
Foone🏳️⚧️
foone@digipres.club@Spanishbeans I gotta go with the hard plastic containers for the 90s realism, tbh
0
0
0
Don't forget that floppies also have a *bandwidth* limit, and it's 250kbps if you're lucky.
That's barely enough for audio, let alone video.
1
0
0
@argv_minus_one @foone Now I'm just sitting here wondering how well it would work with a "modern" codec like H.265 or AV1
1
0
0
Charlotte/Cinny 
charlotte
@CursedSilicon @argv_minus_one @foone yeah you can fit good sounding audio or kinda bad but maybe not unusable video in 128kbps with opus and av1
2
0
2
@charlotte @foone @CursedSilicon
Fun fact: VHS had ginormous storage capacity.
Like, the digital variant D-VHS could store, on a modified Super VHS tape, 50GB.
That's 4 hours of 4K video on a freaking *VHS tape* in freaking *1998*.
But there were no 4K screens or video decoders in 1998, nor an algorithm that could compress 4K down to D-VHS' 28.2Mbps read rate, so its potential was never realized.
It could hold an absurd amount of SD video, though.
2
0
1
@argv_minus_one @charlotte @foone I seem to recall there was a VHS PC "backup" ISA card made in the Soviet Union toward the end of the 80's. Though its recording capacity was nowhere near as large
0
0
0
@argv_minus_one @charlotte @foone
Found it! https://jacobfilipp.com/arvid-vhs/
Even had Linux and FreeBSD drivers!
2
0
0
@CursedSilicon @argv_minus_one @charlotte I've always wanted to find one of thems
0
0
0
argv minus one
argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.orgYeah, there were several efforts to write bits and bytes onto VHS tapes, but they were doing it with VCRs and cables that were not at all designed for the task, and they also weren't using the improved Super VHS tape. Results were nowhere near as good as what JVC accomplished.
Still, 3GB on a common, cheap tape in 1995 is not bad.
0
0
0
argv minus one
argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.orgMy. God.
Serviceable video at a bitrate low enough for dialup.
Now I've seen everything.
0
0
0