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This is very cool! In 1999 my degree final year project was to implement an mpeg decoder in software. My only source of information was the MPEG technical reference manuals. It took me 3 months to be able to decode my first frame. It ran at less than 10fps on an AMD K6, but I learn a lot about video and compression.

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I did exactly the same, but instead purely for fun and learning. Picked a random/blind clip from a naughty movie for extra motivation to get the first frames to the screen :D

I also worked from just the reference book, with no prior knowledge of video coding at all, which made it quite a puzzle to get something on the screen and moving, but it was extremely satisfying when it all worked (to some extent, the thing was horribly slow, broke after one group of predicted frames, and I never implemented chroma, just luma)

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