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1. As GL1zdA already pointed out in blog comments 1992 Creative Video Blaster CT6000 was a single frame screen grabber and not a video encoding/decoding acceler

by rasz 4y ago

1. As GL1zdA already pointed out in blog comments 1992 Creative Video Blaster CT6000 was a single frame screen grabber and not a video encoding/decoding accelerator. YT "Creative Videoblaster CT6000 in action" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LrwSGRflPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LrwSGRflPE shows what it does. http://web.archive.org/web/20000829095056/http://www.ctlsg.creaf.com/support/specs/video/ct6000.html http://web.archive.org/web/20000829095056/http://www.ctlsg.c... "converts a standard full-motion video image (composite video source) into a format for display on a computer graphics monitor" emphasis on the _image_. "It can position and scale the video image onto the output display and allows the video image to be merged with computer graphics for interactive multimedia applicaiton." means overlay analog video on VGA monitor. The first true video decoding accelerator on PC market came out of David Sarnoff Research Center owned by RCA, later purchased by GE, then finally video tech carved out and sold to Intel. Called Digital Video Interactive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Video_Interactive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Video_Interactive it did in fact "real time audio and video decompression, 30 frames per second with a resolution of 320x240". Intel repackaged it into one chip i750 and called it Indeo. Creative released a product based on it in mid 1994 - Video Blaster RT300. PCI bus was already mainstream in 1994, as were Pentiums. You most likely blurred those two together into one product. 2. "so the quality could be very high. Streams of 8 to 12 mbit of data for a single channel were no exception." SD video DVD bitrate is 10Mbit, and here we have OTA stations pushing 720p/1080i at same or lower bw using same codec (US mpeg2). Whole multiplexer in ATSC offers ~20Mbit, and then TV stations cram 3-4 signals in there. Lu Goughs "DRW2022 – Pt5: Digital TV (DVB-T), Digital Radio (DAB+) & FM Radio Analysis" https://goughlui.com/2022/06/05/drw2022-pt5-digital-tv-dvb-t-digital-radio-dab-fm-radio-analysis/ https://goughlui.com/2022/06/05/drw2022-pt5-digital-tv-dvb-t... blog post offers good overview of the OTA TV broadcasting shitshow as seen from Australian perspective. 3-4Mbit is the average. There is nothing "very high quality" about OTA HD TV broadcast. "‘gold standard’ of 4k 60 fps video, streaming services is where you’ll find it" you mean Netflix 4K 24 fps at 15Mbit? :-) That is the reality we are living in now. Apple is an outlier doing 25-40Mbit, everything else is bad. 3 "CRT has some afterglow after the ray has scanned a given area, the even field was still visible somewhat as the odd field was drawn. So the two fields would blend somewhat together" This is simply not how TV works, there is no somewhat, there is no afterglow. CRT goes dark after about 10 lines have been scanned in. "An LCD screen does not have the same ‘afterglow’ that a CRT has" LCD does in fact retain whole picture until the next update, aka "full afterglow" as you would put it. "so there’s no natural ‘deinterlacing’ effect that blends the screens together." The natural deinterlacing effect happens in viewers brain, not on the Screen. You got this entirely backwards. The whole reason interlaced picture doesnt work on LCD is because previous frame stays on the screen. I highly recommend "How a TV Works in Slow Motion - The Slow Mo Guys" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM 4. "HD, another new standard was required, as DVD was limited to SD." Sony used HD as an excuse to push new format with new licensing fees. Nothing, other than corporate greed, necessitated new storage medium. h.264 was already on the market, as were other efficient codecs. There were even failed attempts like Versatile Multilayer Disc using standard DVD with VC-1 coding. 5. 4K "special kind of confusion" who? This is the first time I hear about people associating 4K with new video codecs.

johnwalkr 4y ago
I was huge into following the latest sound cards and video cards in the mid-late 90s, owned multiple soundblaster cards, and I didn't even remember a product called video blaster. I also checked the archive links, and aside from one model, these products were for encoding, not decoding. From my recollection, FMV on computers was a novelty reserved for short clips in games and encyclopedias like Encarta. You could go to a computer store and see a demo of a video playing from a cdrom on a 486/windows 3.1/MPEG-certified video card around 1993. But video on the PC was consistently even similar quality to VHS until Windows 95, MacOS System 7 and hardware from that time had decent support. If you had windows 95 and even the slowest Pentium, you could watch a good quality MPEG file. Granted, no content was available except for "weezer.mpg", a music video easter egg on the windows 95 cdrom, and you could download short high-quality clips such as clever commercials. For streaming an entire TV show, you could only find grainy "realvideo" streams by word-of-mouth. A sidenote is that they did work better in one sense than streaming today-- I remember watching star wars in realtime with IRC friends. The serving person had a cable modem and at least some of the viewers had 56kbps modems. These days, my phone plan throttles to 100kbps when I run out of data, and I can load HN, barely load a google search, can't load most news sites without timing out, and wouldn't even be able to navigate to any kind of video, let alone stream one. I'm also still disappointed in the quality of streaming services of movies. 4K often looks worse than 1080p. I live in Japan and broadcast TV 1080p looks so so much better than most streaming at any resolution. The Mandalorian is the exception that comes to mind. It's annoying that anytime I've checked out 4k and 8k TVs in an electronics store, I see the same demo videos for the last few years. Great-looking but utterly boring content like a man swinging ropes around in a puddle and paint bouncing around on some kind of speaker cone or drumhead. Really drives home the point that content that actually takes advantage of the (amazing) 4k+, HDR screens is lacking. On the other hand, I appreciate that the floor of quality is quite high, and for a person that grew up loving "this old house" as a kid, I can open youtube and see incredibly high quality/high-image quality content on any subject, whether broad or deep. And most of it is created, starring produced, and edited by one person. That's a totally different discussion though.

by rasz 4y ago

johnwalkr 4y ago

I was huge into following the latest sound cards and video cards in the mid-late 90s, owned multiple soundblaster cards, and I didn't even remember a product called video blaster. I also checked the archive links, and aside from one model, these products were for encoding, not decoding. From my recollection, FMV on computers was a novelty reserved for short clips in games and encyclopedias like Encarta. You could go to a computer store and see a demo of a video playing from a cdrom on a 486/windows 3.1/MPEG-certified video card around 1993. But video on the PC was consistently even similar quality to VHS until Windows 95, MacOS System 7 and hardware from that time had decent support. If you had windows 95 and even the slowest Pentium, you could watch a good quality MPEG file. Granted, no content was available except for "weezer.mpg", a music video easter egg on the windows 95 cdrom, and you could download short high-quality clips such as clever commercials. For streaming an entire TV show, you could only find grainy "realvideo" streams by word-of-mouth. A sidenote is that they did work better in one sense than streaming today-- I remember watching star wars in realtime with IRC friends. The serving person had a cable modem and at least some of the viewers had 56kbps modems. These days, my phone plan throttles to 100kbps when I run out of data, and I can load HN, barely load a google search, can't load most news sites without timing out, and wouldn't even be able to navigate to any kind of video, let alone stream one. I'm also still disappointed in the quality of streaming services of movies. 4K often looks worse than 1080p. I live in Japan and broadcast TV 1080p looks so so much better than most streaming at any resolution. The Mandalorian is the exception that comes to mind. It's annoying that anytime I've checked out 4k and 8k TVs in an electronics store, I see the same demo videos for the last few years. Great-looking but utterly boring content like a man swinging ropes around in a puddle and paint bouncing around on some kind of speaker cone or drumhead. Really drives home the point that content that actually takes advantage of the (amazing) 4k+, HDR screens is lacking. On the other hand, I appreciate that the floor of quality is quite high, and for a person that grew up loving "this old house" as a kid, I can open youtube and see incredibly high quality/high-image quality content on any subject, whether broad or deep. And most of it is created, starring produced, and edited by one person. That's a totally different discussion though.