Guy compresses Shrek onto a 1.44MB floppy disk

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/29/guy-compresses-shrek-onto-a-1-44mb-floppy-disk.html

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A lot like playing Street Fighter II on the Commodore Amiga!

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Still looks better than Sega CD.

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Wow. That is neat. I mean, what if they upped the frame rate and you could play the whole movie over half a dozen disks? I am impressed the audio worked too.

Could you imagine playing low res movies like that back then on disks? I bet people would have done it. Or maybe as cut scenes for games?

Also, was he using a filter to make it look like he was using an old VHS recorder? And if not, why didn’t he adjust it properly to get rid of the static and lines?

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Almost like streaming Real video files in days of dial-up minus all sleazy attempts to get you to signup for spam etc.

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I remember when someone created the Floggy encoder. Ogg Vorbis albums that would fit on a floppy.

It sounded better than you would expect, while also managing to not be particularly listenable. I still wish I had kept it even though it was of no practical use.

ETA:

I found this

https://sjeng.org/floggy.html

It wasn’t publicly available, so I have no idea how I ended up with a copy.

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Does the codec also fit on the floppy?

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The x265 encoder download that I found after a quick search is 4MB, so probably not.

I remember some discussions about codecs, and how you could theoretically compress anything losslessy to one bit, but the codec would be bigger than the source file.

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you could theoretically compress anything losslessy to one bit

More like, you could theoretically compress two things losslessly to one bit. Because at one bit, how would you tell anything else apart?

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Two different things, yes, but those two things could be anything. The codec would be useless for anything else though.

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Reminds me of my first samsung mp3 player. Had something like 512MB of storage, a 96x128 color screen and could playback videos that you made by running your mpeg1/2 file through samsung’s proprietary h.263 codec to give you a 12fps video.

I remember spending a long time putting the Fellowship of the Ring onto that thing for a school band road trip to Montana.

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You could probably make it totally listenable today using Xiph’s Opus codec. I can get away with doing audiobooks about 20kbit/sec at 22kHz and it sounds fine.

In fact, for speech at least, opus does better than the purpose built speex codec. Better sounding at lower bitrates and samplerates

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So, you just, like, play Smash Mouth somewhere else to get the full movie experience?

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What’s its Weissman score though?

I’m assuming it’s a middle out compression…

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My god. It converted “Shrek” into a crappy point and click adventure game, being played on a computer whose memory is almost maxed out. I’m impressed in a pyrrhic-victory sort of way.

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Diskmaster when compressed reveals: Disaster.

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One major problem with this:

Shrek came out in 2001, five years after the DVD, and three years after the imac (which famously ditched the floppy drive).

It throws off the entire timeline, as most everyone had figured out that VHS sucked.

What sort of supercomputer would you have needed to decode a highly compressed h.265 movie?

The additional filter makes it hard to judge the floppy based movie against vintage systems like Hi-Vision/MUSE.

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Yep, If you are willing to tolerate the the huge loss of quality etc you can achieve incredible compression ratios. Though I wonder if he could have traded color for a better frame rate?

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I hope I’m the only one who thought it said, “I’maTek Disaster”…

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