9 ms·
MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
- pcdoodle 5y agoThis is so cool
- lostgame 5y agoWhat a bizarre, mostly useless; yet absolutely neat utility. Of course, disk space is the immediate reason why it's so impractical.
- dylan604 5y agoI'm sure Apple has an ADB->USB dongle for $19.99 that you can use to connect a larger bit of storage. Actually, did these guys have SCSI ports on the back? SCSI->USB or SCSI->TB4 would be an fun cable.
- rideontime 5y agoThe link itself has the answers to your questions.
- klodolph 5y agoADB -> USB is third-party only, somewhat rare, and they only support input devices like mice and keyboards (no storage). I don't think Apple ever made them. The only one I know of is the Wombat ADB-USB converter. (You can find plenty of converters that go the opposite way around, letting you plug ADB devices into USB.) You can theoretically put anything you want on ADB, but you'd need drivers to do anything but mouse/keyboard, and Wikipedia lists the "actual" bitrate as 10 kbit/s.
- wvdk 5y agoA fantastic off-the-shelf solution is already available: https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/ https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/ It can emulate a floppy or hard drive. I tend to use a 2GB hard drive image which makes hacking on classic Mac a delight.
- fstark 5y agoThe floppyemu is awesome for floppy emulation or for old HD20-like hard drives. But they are too slow for macflim. As I say on the link, you need either a real scsi disk, or, better an scsi emulator, like a SCSI2H https://store.inertialcomputing.com/SCSI2SD-s/100.htm https://store.inertialcomputing.com/SCSI2SD-s/100.htm, a RaSCSI https://www.tindie.com/products/landogriffin/rascsi-macintosh-version/ https://www.tindie.com/products/landogriffin/rascsi-macintos..., a BlueSCSI https://gumroad.com/l/bluescsi-1b https://gumroad.com/l/bluescsi-1b or a MacSD http://macsd.com/ http://macsd.com/ The Mac(s) on the video have a SCSI2HD v5.5, with 4 2Gb partitions on a microsd. I can mount the first partition on my linux to copy stuff onto it (in general via the minivmac emulator).
- sp332 5y agoNot ADB, but AppleTalk might have handled it.
- fstark 5y agoHi. 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 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 have time, try the app, it is full of inside time-correct jokes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- VeejayRampay 5y agoflim sounds like a strange way a French person would pronounce "film" for fun
- fstark 5y agoIt is an inside joke about a French movie made from barely legal cuts of hilariously dubbed Warner Bros extracts. I found th3e concept weirdly suitable for a tongue-in-cheek artistic experiment that will probably mostly be used to display extract of other people movies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Classe_am%C3%A9ricaine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Classe_am%C3%A9ricaine
- VeejayRampay 5y agoGeorge Abitbol, etc. I thought it was!! very nice job anyway
- azinman2 5y agoCongrats. This is a massive technical feat. Are you going to publish the source, and/or give a technical talk on how all of this is achieved?
- fstark 5y ago
- OldGoodNewBad 5y agoOld Apple II’s and Macs will never truly die, they’re just too much fun. Emulation and FPGA solutions exist and once gone over, the hardware is very robust. Replace the old caps with tantalum, align the screen, and you’re set.
- fstark 5y agoYep. Emulation is good, but using the real hardware is magical. Fun fact: the reason why macflim had no sound originally is that my SE30s have bad caps (like most), and no sound. So many people asked for sound that I had to recap those surface mount caps (ouch my eyes!) so I could actually hack a version with sound :-)
- ddingus 5y agoThat is the good fight! I love it too. Simple, fun, pretty robust hardware.
- KozmoNau7 5y agoThere's something special about that stark 1-bit B/W display and the necessary dithering to produce shades of grey. There are patterns to it and a very particular aesthetic. Early 16- and 256-color systems are great too, but pure B/W has that certain look to it.
- petermcneeley 5y agoIf the scanout is at 60Hz you can probably get shades of grey in there by a temporal dither.
- fstark 5y agoOuch. You planted an idea in my brain that may lead to the complete re-development of the whole thing. 3 colors? That would be the middle link between the Original Mac and the Original NeXT !
- glhaynes 5y agoI 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!
- II2II 5y agoBecause 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.)
- anthk 5y agoEh, if the G3 has altivec suport it could play XVid videos perfectly. If you got a MOV file with a MP4 video, OFC a G3 would struggle, but mplayer/mpv may be able to play it fastly if the resolution is under 720p if you skip the loop filter. EDIT: Ok, just for G4 and up. Understandable. Also, is NOT that impressive. You could watch XVid illegal rips just fine in 2002-2006. Heck, even a Pentium 2@450 with NetBSD could do that seamlessly.
- tyingq 5y agoAh, full justification for me to now upgrade my Mac Plus with an accelerator board: https://www.micromac.com/products/multispeed.html https://www.micromac.com/products/multispeed.html Surprised these are still ~$100-200 ... that's a bargain.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y agoi'm skeptical this link actually works... googling around, it looks like no one might be watching this site: https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/6svp32/any_accelerator_boards_still_to_be_found/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/6svp32/any_ac... I've been looking for an accelerator board for my mac SE, but can't find anything reasonably priced anywhere...
- tyingq 5y agoAh, well, that's too bad. And you're right, what can be found is expensive.
- gcanyon 5y agoI’m not sure I understand what’s new here: I remember watching early QuickTime video on my SE30 and marveling that it managed to convert on the fly to dithered B&W. Still: love to see this!
- dunnevens 5y agoMaybe the difference is smooth full screen playback? I remember the early QT too, and used it on my old LC. Playback was mostly ok (15 fps or so) at 320x240 (think that was the resolution) but would strain if I increased the size. Memories are a bit weak, so I might be misremembering some of this. But I do clearly remember full screen videos dropping a ton of frames. I used to put full screen videos up when I had parties (computer video was still a novelty and it made for a nice backdrop as people danced/drank) and it was 5 fps at best on that poor underpowered machine.
- geerlingguy 5y agoYeah having used many Macs from that era even a species out II series Mac would have a lot of stuttering playing any video larger than about 320x240, and definitely nowhere near 24 FPS.
- gcanyon 5y agoOh, definitely: video on the SE30 was maybe 100x60 pixels? And as you say, not 30fps. I was just reacting to how everything here seems to emphasize the “it does b&w dither video” aspect over the “large format and high frame rate” aspect.
- fstark 5y agoAre you sure? I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that Quicktime on a SE/30 was not able to display fullscreen videos at 24 fps. Also, the dithering used in QuickTime was an ordered dithering, which IMO is pretty ugly and eats details.
- gcanyon 5y agoOh gosh no — not full screen or full frame rate. As I mentioned in another response, “full motion” in my head did not translate to “full screen” so the claim emphasis (again, in my head) was more on the “(dithered) b&w video on old Macs” aspect. Kudos!
- mmphosis 5y agoFull motion Double High Res video playback on the Apple IIe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tHenz0oU-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tHenz0oU-4
- fstark 5y agoYes. This is absolutely insane, with image encoded into 6502 machine code, and PWM sound interleaced. It doesn't work on period hardware, thought (needs a special modern card, the CFFA3000, that is out of production). I thought that this particular video, using the 1984 ad I used, was a reply to my earlier macflim video :-) That red skirt made me feel like Constable against Turner... https://www.brightreddot.org/objective/ https://www.brightreddot.org/objective/ ...
- JeremyBanks 5y agoThis makes me want to dig my old Mac Plus out of the garage. Very cool!
- reaperducer 5y agoIt's interesting to see old hardware being used for video that was never thought capable. A few weeks ago I saw that there is a guy making carts that play 80's movies on Atari 2600's. (The quality of the movies is terrible, but it's a fascinating project. And the carts and boxes look real.)
- thudson 5y agoA few years ago I built an adapter to allow classic Mac CRT's to be used with BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi systems ( https://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video https://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video). X11 has supported 1-bit mono displays since forever, so it mostly worked out of the box with well written programs. Watching youtube videos in 1-bit is an amazing aesthetic. Unfortunately all of my videos of it were on vine, so this Muybridge-esque cat video seems to be the only one that I cross-posted to twitter: https://twitter.com/qrs/status/1045272076750401536 https://twitter.com/qrs/status/1045272076750401536
- fstark 5y agoHey that's cool, awesome, and completely outside of area of expertise! I love it!