5 ms·

Digital Video File Formats (1994)

31 points by Lammy 4y ago

RRWagner 4y ago
I have a bunch of .moov video files from the Mac that I've been trying for years to figure out how to view again. QuickTime on the Mac no longer recognizes them, even though they were originally QuickTime movies. Maybe even from the QuickTake camera. Does anyone here know a way to open those old files?
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  VLC media player should be able to handle them. It inherits its broad support for codecs and containers obsolete and obscure from the FFmpeg libraries that it's based on. You can also transcode/remux to a newer codec/container using VLC (along with the FFmpeg CLI itself and the several other FOSS GUIs for it dedicated to transcoding), though you'll need to choose a lossless codec or encoding setting to avoid degradation.
- Lammy 4y ago
  If they were transferred from a classic Mac it's possible their Resource Forks were destroyed in the process.
Lammy 4y ago
Interesting historical note: this "Dr. Dobbs Journal" article was written by the president of the company sued by Apple later in 1994 for the re-use of Quicktime-for-Windows source code in VFW, eventually leading to Microsoft's 1997 "Apple bailout" settlement. "Mark is president of the San Francisco Canyon Company, which developed QuickTime for Windows for Apple Computer. Canyon publishes the Movie Toolkit, a C++ class library for manipulating QuickTime and AVI movie files, and Canyon Clipz!. Canyon's How to Digitize Video will be published by John Wiley in early 1994." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company "The lawsuit Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co., filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows."
don-code 4y ago
> Imagine if mass-storage devices were cheap enough that you could afford 307 gigabytes for a single movie. Your hardware would still have to support a sustained data rate of 1 Mbyte per second to play it back. I recently bought a $20 flash drive to store the entire contents of a my friend's late-2000s PC with a 250GB hard drive on. Didn't think much of it. (Yes, I know the article is from 1994.)
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Even with that modern stupid large flash drive, you'd only have a single movie two hour in 480p for the 300GB. Even just MPEG-1 video (in 480p) you could store over 150 two hour movies in the same space. A modern codec like h.264 could fit twice that many.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  If mass storage densities had kept on doubling every 13 months or so, 307 gigabytes per movie file would probably not seem extraordinary today – we would have several-PB storage media by now. But as it stands, even a state-of-the-art hard drive isn't going to hold many uncompressed movies – especially given that 640x480 doesn't quite cut it anymore!
marcodiego 4y ago
The first time I watched video stream on the PC through the internet was through RealPlayer G2 on a 33600bps modem. I could never use VDOLive, but I remember it to be well regarded at the time. Anyone knows a simple FLOSS app that allows me stream a camera directly from my computer? I'd like to try exposing the capture of a webcam through TOR to access it from anywhere without requiring any specialized service.
- don-code 4y ago
  It might be overkill, but you could run https://zoneminder.com/ https://zoneminder.com/ in unauthenticated mode, with a single webcam as an input. It'd at least give you a nice Web interface, as opposed to some other solutions which use raw streams over HTTP/RTSP that aren't approachable in a Web browser.
  - marcodiego 4y ago
    I'm more interested in something like a simple ffmpeg or vlc command line or a small app specific for the purpose.
    - LeoPanthera 4y ago
      ffmpeg will do it. Webcam Capture: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam Streaming: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide
giantrobot 4y ago
One of the coolest aspects of the QuickTime format (the one I know the most about) was the separation of the moov and mdat atoms. It let an editing application define cuts and add tracks without reserializing (to say nothing of re-encoding) the whole file. A track referenced in a moov header could also point to an entirely different file on disk. A lot of non-destructive edits could simply be performed on the moov header which could live on a small slow disk referencing mdats in files living on a large fast disk. Thanks to the way aliases worked the external file could be an alias to sort of get automatically found if the large fast disk was removable like an external SCSI disk. This let the relatively weak 68k Macs of the day do offline editing of video without a bunch of extra hardware (like the Amiga's VideoToaster). The QuickTime format did allow the moov and mdat atoms to be serialized into a monolithic file so they could work on single fork file systems. The format was later extended so external references could be URLs. Ref Movies were a small MOV that referenced tracks living at different URLs. This was extended further to tag referenced tracks with bandwidth settings much like how HLS works. A small Ref Movie could point to a postage stamp 56k stream and a high res T1 stream (or whatever bandwidth) and the player depending on its local network conditions would pick the appropriate reference. QuickTime Player 7's "Export for Web" function used this method. It would encode multiple versions of a movie then build a Ref Movie pointing to them. It even built a small HTML file with the appropriate embed/object tag incantation to stick the output on the web easily. RealPlayer had similar reference functionality with RAM files, they could reference streams at multiple bandwidths to let the player pick the appropriate one for local conditions.
ktpsns 4y ago
Video file formats is probably one division of "practical computing" where the last 30 years really made a big difference. MP3 was invented in 1991 and revolutionized the music industry. In my impression, DivX had a somewhat comparable impact on sharing and streaming movies. Modern video compression is so amazing efficient that it always blasts my head how a short movie is only slightly larger then a JPEG still frame. I don't know any other lossy file compression which is similarly amazing.
- lostgame 4y ago
  DivX - wow, that brings back memories of torrenting movies in the mid-00’s. It really was the only way to get a balance of decent video quality with a reasonable (usually 700MB or less, for CD-video purposes) file size. My computer was too weak to really play back said DivX files at the time (‘02? ‘03?) - so I would burn them and play them through my Dreamcast with a TV tuner card attached to my computer tower. (I didn’t have a TV of my own, but I had a computer monitor!) The only other alternatives I knew of at the time were QuickTime (which got big fast when it was longer) and AVI, which; AFAIK, didn’t even use compression and was thusly huge. It’s not a wonder that DivX is gone now; but for a while, it was just insanely prevelant.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    DivX started life as hacked DLL for one of Microsoft's early MPEG-4 part 2 implementations. By default Microsoft only allowed its MPEG-4 codecs to be written to WMV/ASF containers. The hacked DLL let a DirectShow filter put the MPEG-4 bitstream in an AVI container. Later versions of the DivX codec were full implementations of the ISO MPEG-4 part 2 codec written from scratch. The nominal "DivX" file was an AVI with the DivX video codec and an MP3 audio track. Unfortunately because the codec and format were all sort of hacked together there were lots of different combinations of various DivX, MS-MPEG-4, Windows Audio, and MP3 combinations floating around. In addition people would encode movies with all kinds of different settings trying to eek out a few extra minutes of video on a 700MB CD-R. DivX tried to advertise itself as "the MP3 of video". It was really the clusterfuck of video that only worked because everyone just installed codec packs (K-lite or ffdshow) and hoped for the best.

31 points by Lammy 4y ago

I have a bunch of .moov video files from the Mac that I've been trying for years to figure out how to view again. QuickTime on the Mac no longer recognizes them, even though they were originally QuickTime movies. Maybe even from the QuickTake camera. Does anyone here know a way to open those old files?

mgdlbp 4y ago
VLC media player should be able to handle them. It inherits its broad support for codecs and containers obsolete and obscure from the FFmpeg libraries that it's based on. You can also transcode/remux to a newer codec/container using VLC (along with the FFmpeg CLI itself and the several other FOSS GUIs for it dedicated to transcoding), though you'll need to choose a lossless codec or encoding setting to avoid degradation.
Lammy 4y ago
If they were transferred from a classic Mac it's possible their Resource Forks were destroyed in the process.

Lammy 4y ago

Interesting historical note: this "Dr. Dobbs Journal" article was written by the president of the company sued by Apple later in 1994 for the re-use of Quicktime-for-Windows source code in VFW, eventually leading to Microsoft's 1997 "Apple bailout" settlement. "Mark is president of the San Francisco Canyon Company, which developed QuickTime for Windows for Apple Computer. Canyon publishes the Movie Toolkit, a C++ class library for manipulating QuickTime and AVI movie files, and Canyon Clipz!. Canyon's How to Digitize Video will be published by John Wiley in early 1994." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company "The lawsuit Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co., filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows."

don-code 4y ago

> Imagine if mass-storage devices were cheap enough that you could afford 307 gigabytes for a single movie. Your hardware would still have to support a sustained data rate of 1 Mbyte per second to play it back. I recently bought a $20 flash drive to store the entire contents of a my friend's late-2000s PC with a 250GB hard drive on. Didn't think much of it. (Yes, I know the article is from 1994.)

giantrobot 4y ago
Even with that modern stupid large flash drive, you'd only have a single movie two hour in 480p for the 300GB. Even just MPEG-1 video (in 480p) you could store over 150 two hour movies in the same space. A modern codec like h.264 could fit twice that many.
Sharlin 4y ago
If mass storage densities had kept on doubling every 13 months or so, 307 gigabytes per movie file would probably not seem extraordinary today – we would have several-PB storage media by now. But as it stands, even a state-of-the-art hard drive isn't going to hold many uncompressed movies – especially given that 640x480 doesn't quite cut it anymore!

marcodiego 4y ago

The first time I watched video stream on the PC through the internet was through RealPlayer G2 on a 33600bps modem. I could never use VDOLive, but I remember it to be well regarded at the time. Anyone knows a simple FLOSS app that allows me stream a camera directly from my computer? I'd like to try exposing the capture of a webcam through TOR to access it from anywhere without requiring any specialized service.

don-code 4y ago
It might be overkill, but you could run https://zoneminder.com/ https://zoneminder.com/ in unauthenticated mode, with a single webcam as an input. It'd at least give you a nice Web interface, as opposed to some other solutions which use raw streams over HTTP/RTSP that aren't approachable in a Web browser.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  I'm more interested in something like a simple ffmpeg or vlc command line or a small app specific for the purpose.
  - LeoPanthera 4y ago
    ffmpeg will do it. Webcam Capture: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam Streaming: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide

giantrobot 4y ago

One of the coolest aspects of the QuickTime format (the one I know the most about) was the separation of the moov and mdat atoms. It let an editing application define cuts and add tracks without reserializing (to say nothing of re-encoding) the whole file. A track referenced in a moov header could also point to an entirely different file on disk. A lot of non-destructive edits could simply be performed on the moov header which could live on a small slow disk referencing mdats in files living on a large fast disk. Thanks to the way aliases worked the external file could be an alias to sort of get automatically found if the large fast disk was removable like an external SCSI disk. This let the relatively weak 68k Macs of the day do offline editing of video without a bunch of extra hardware (like the Amiga's VideoToaster). The QuickTime format did allow the moov and mdat atoms to be serialized into a monolithic file so they could work on single fork file systems. The format was later extended so external references could be URLs. Ref Movies were a small MOV that referenced tracks living at different URLs. This was extended further to tag referenced tracks with bandwidth settings much like how HLS works. A small Ref Movie could point to a postage stamp 56k stream and a high res T1 stream (or whatever bandwidth) and the player depending on its local network conditions would pick the appropriate reference. QuickTime Player 7's "Export for Web" function used this method. It would encode multiple versions of a movie then build a Ref Movie pointing to them. It even built a small HTML file with the appropriate embed/object tag incantation to stick the output on the web easily. RealPlayer had similar reference functionality with RAM files, they could reference streams at multiple bandwidths to let the player pick the appropriate one for local conditions.

ktpsns 4y ago

Video file formats is probably one division of "practical computing" where the last 30 years really made a big difference. MP3 was invented in 1991 and revolutionized the music industry. In my impression, DivX had a somewhat comparable impact on sharing and streaming movies. Modern video compression is so amazing efficient that it always blasts my head how a short movie is only slightly larger then a JPEG still frame. I don't know any other lossy file compression which is similarly amazing.

lostgame 4y ago
DivX - wow, that brings back memories of torrenting movies in the mid-00’s. It really was the only way to get a balance of decent video quality with a reasonable (usually 700MB or less, for CD-video purposes) file size. My computer was too weak to really play back said DivX files at the time (‘02? ‘03?) - so I would burn them and play them through my Dreamcast with a TV tuner card attached to my computer tower. (I didn’t have a TV of my own, but I had a computer monitor!) The only other alternatives I knew of at the time were QuickTime (which got big fast when it was longer) and AVI, which; AFAIK, didn’t even use compression and was thusly huge. It’s not a wonder that DivX is gone now; but for a while, it was just insanely prevelant.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  DivX started life as hacked DLL for one of Microsoft's early MPEG-4 part 2 implementations. By default Microsoft only allowed its MPEG-4 codecs to be written to WMV/ASF containers. The hacked DLL let a DirectShow filter put the MPEG-4 bitstream in an AVI container. Later versions of the DivX codec were full implementations of the ISO MPEG-4 part 2 codec written from scratch. The nominal "DivX" file was an AVI with the DivX video codec and an MP3 audio track. Unfortunately because the codec and format were all sort of hacked together there were lots of different combinations of various DivX, MS-MPEG-4, Windows Audio, and MP3 combinations floating around. In addition people would encode movies with all kinds of different settings trying to eek out a few extra minutes of video on a 700MB CD-R. DivX tried to advertise itself as "the MP3 of video". It was really the clusterfuck of video that only worked because everyone just installed codec packs (K-lite or ffdshow) and hoped for the best.