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 ca

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.