At a time when you need to do your best to buy a new TV with a resolution of less than 4K, a Redditor has decided that their eyes do not need luxuries like 4K, 2K, HD or even standard videos def and have created a custom VCR who plays in full movies on floppy disks with only 1.44 MB of storage.
For comparison, an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc has a dual capacity of 66 GB for storing movies at 4K resolutions, while a single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold 25 GB, enough to support a movie at HD resolutions . DVDs, which store videos at standard definition resolutions, have a storage capacity of 4.7 GB or 4,700 MB, and even photos shot in ProRAW format on an iPhone 12 Pro take up 25 to 40 MB. Trying to squeeze a 90-minute movie in just 1.44 MB seems like an act of futility, but when did someone on the internet stop doing this?
Making GreedyPaint, if you want to call it that, it’s actually a two-part hack. The most important piece is a habit x265 video codec which crushes video files up to 120 x 96 pixel resolutions running at four frames per second. Shrek, as presented in a video they shared on Reddit, actually compressed up to just 1.37 MB, including the sound of the movie, which, as you might expect, is as much a chore for the viewer’s ears as the compressed video is for their eyes.
The other part of this hack is a custom VCR built around a Raspberry Pi with a floppy disk drive instead of a VHS cassette slot. LimaTek Diskmaster even starts with a splash screen with the player’s corporate brand and is programmed to automatically play the video file stored on an inserted floppy disk. Instead of a modern flat-screen TV, Diskmaster was connected to a small old-school CRT TV, which probably helped soften and hide many of the video file’s ugliest compression artifacts, but watch the entire movie this way. it would be considerably worse than watching in Full HD – which is already a kind of chore.
While GreedyPaint has no intention of trying to put LimaTek Diskmaster into production (they clearly did their market research and realized that few people would even consider spending money on it), there are a few interesting ways it could be improved, including streaming the small video signaled by a machine learning algorithm to see if image quality and frame rate can be increased and improved to resolutions that won’t leave the viewer’s eyes in agony.
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