[HN Gopher] Digital Video File Formats (1994)
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Digital Video File Formats (1994)
Author : Lammy
Score : 26 points
Date : 2022-06-11 22:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.retro.co.za)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.retro.co.za)
| don-code wrote:
| > Imagine if mass-storage devices were cheap enough that you
| could afford 307 gigabytes for a single movie. Your hardware
| would still have to support a sustained data rate of 1 Mbyte per
| second to play it back.
|
| I recently bought a $20 flash drive to store the entire contents
| of a my friend's late-2000s PC with a 250GB hard drive on. Didn't
| think much of it.
|
| (Yes, I know the article is from 1994.)
| Sharlin wrote:
| If mass storage densities had kept on doubling every 13 months
| or so, 307 gigabytes per movie file would probably not seem
| extraordinary today - we would have several-PB storage media by
| now. But as it stands, even a state-of-the-art hard drive isn't
| going to hold many uncompressed movies - especially given that
| 640x480 doesn't quite cut it anymore!
| giantrobot wrote:
| Even with that modern stupid large flash drive, you'd only have
| a single movie two hour in 480p for the 300GB. Even just MPEG-1
| video (in 480p) you could store over 150 two hour movies in the
| same space. A modern codec like h.264 could fit twice that
| many.
| marcodiego wrote:
| The first time I watched video stream on the PC through the
| internet was through RealPlayer G2 on a 33600bps modem. I could
| never use VDOLive, but I remember it to be well regarded at the
| time.
|
| Anyone knows a simple FLOSS app that allows me stream a camera
| directly from my computer? I'd like to try exposing the capture
| of a webcam through TOR to access it from anywhere without
| requiring any specialized service.
| don-code wrote:
| It might be overkill, but you could run https://zoneminder.com/
| in unauthenticated mode, with a single webcam as an input. It'd
| at least give you a nice Web interface, as opposed to some
| other solutions which use raw streams over HTTP/RTSP that
| aren't approachable in a Web browser.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I'm more interested in something like a simple ffmpeg or vlc
| command line or a small app specific for the purpose.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| ffmpeg will do it.
|
| Webcam Capture: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam
|
| Streaming: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide
| Lammy wrote:
| Interesting historical note: this "Dr. Dobbs Journal" article was
| written by the president of the company sued by Apple later in
| 1994 for the re-use of Quicktime-for-Windows source code in VFW,
| eventually leading to Microsoft's 1997 "Apple bailout"
| settlement.
|
| "Mark is president of the San Francisco Canyon Company, which
| developed QuickTime for Windows for Apple Computer. Canyon
| publishes the Movie Toolkit, a C++ class library for manipulating
| QuickTime and AVI movie files, and Canyon Clipz!. Canyon's How to
| Digitize Video will be published by John Wiley in early 1994."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
|
| "The lawsuit _Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co._ , filed
| on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon
| Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple
| in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the
| lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995,
| alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software
| company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's
| QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of
| Video for Windows."
| ktpsns wrote:
| Video file formats is probably one division of "practical
| computing" where the last 30 years really made a big difference.
| MP3 was invented in 1991 and revolutionized the music industry.
| In my impression, DivX had a somewhat comparable impact on
| sharing and streaming movies.
|
| Modern video compression is so amazing efficient that it always
| blasts my head how a short movie is only slightly larger then a
| JPEG still frame. I don't know any other lossy file compression
| which is similarly amazing.
| lostgame wrote:
| DivX - _wow_ , that brings back memories of torrenting movies
| in the mid-00's.
|
| It really was the _only_ way to get a balance of decent video
| quality with a reasonable (usually 700MB or less, for CD-video
| purposes) file size.
|
| My computer was too weak to really play back said DivX files at
| the time ('02? '03?) - so I would burn them and play them
| through my Dreamcast with a TV tuner card attached to my
| computer tower. (I didn't have a TV of my own, but I had a
| computer monitor!)
|
| The only other alternatives I knew of at the time were
| QuickTime (which got big fast when it was longer) and AVI,
| which; AFAIK, didn't even use compression and was thusly huge.
|
| It's not a wonder that DivX is gone now; but for a while, it
| was just insanely prevelant.
| giantrobot wrote:
| One of the coolest aspects of the QuickTime format (the one I
| know the most about) was the separation of the moov and mdat
| atoms. It let an editing application define cuts and add tracks
| without reserializing (to say nothing of re-encoding) the whole
| file. A track referenced in a moov header could also point to an
| entirely different file on disk. A lot of non-destructive edits
| could simply be performed on the moov header which could live on
| a small slow disk referencing mdats in files living on a large
| fast disk. Thanks to the way aliases worked the external file
| could be an alias to sort of get automatically found if the large
| fast disk was removable like an external SCSI disk.
|
| This let the relatively weak 68k Macs of the day do offline
| editing of video without a bunch of extra hardware (like the
| Amiga's VideoToaster).
|
| The QuickTime format did allow the moov and mdat atoms to be
| serialized into a monolithic file so they could work on single
| fork file systems. The format was later extended so external
| references could be URLs. Ref Movies were a small MOV that
| referenced tracks living at different URLs.
|
| This was extended further to tag referenced tracks with bandwidth
| settings much like how HLS works. A small Ref Movie could point
| to a postage stamp 56k stream and a high res T1 stream (or
| whatever bandwidth) and the player depending on its local network
| conditions would pick the appropriate reference. QuickTime Player
| 7's "Export for Web" function used this method. It would encode
| multiple versions of a movie then build a Ref Movie pointing to
| them. It even built a small HTML file with the appropriate
| embed/object tag incantation to stick the output on the web
| easily.
|
| RealPlayer had similar reference functionality with RAM files,
| they could reference streams at multiple bandwidths to let the
| player pick the appropriate one for local conditions.
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