Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> it'll take them OVER THREE HOURS

I remember frequently spending three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s. Mostly software, not videos+, but it really just felt like a regular thing back then.

+ Computers nearly didn't have the power to decode video—or even audio—in realtime back then, unless it was the entirely uncompressed kind. I recall ripping a CD to WAV and finding out half-way that my 2GB hard drive was now 100% full.

View on HN

I think your memory of the late 90's is actually from the early 90's ;)

I remember the first realtime mp3 player on Windows, Fraunhofer IIS' WinPlay3, which launched in '95. Then Winamp came out in '97 and blew our minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3

You needed about a 100mhz CPU to playback mp3s without skipping. Seemed to hold both on my PPC mac and pentium windows machine.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

My intel box may have been a 166Mhz machine. Either way this assumed you weren't trying to do anything else. The PPC mac was definitely 100mhz though - maybe Apple marketing wasn't a lying about perf/clock back in those days.

I used a Pentium 100 MHz and it would play just fine. Encoding them would take real-time (i.e. a 3 minute song would encode in 3 minutes), but playing back was fine. I even listened to music while doing other things. This was with Winamp.

Yes I remember using mods and xm files instead as attempting to play a low bitrate MP3 on a Pentium 100 (I think?) Elonex laptop meant 100% CPU.

Even tried it on mpg123 and mpg321 on RedHat on a 486 DX66 - I was poor. Didn't fare any better.

You would have much better chances with Opus and its integer decoder today.

I played MP3's on a 486 DX4/100mhz. There was a setting in winamp I had to turn on (I think it was quality related) otherwise it would stutter and be generally unlistenable. Even with that setting turned on it pegged the CPU at about 100% the computer was unusable for anything else while the mp3 was playing. Trying to seek in the track would sometimes crash winamp.

My Pentium 166 on the other hand was much more capable I could multitask while playing Mp3's (I used to play mp3's and Quake at the same time).

I think somewhere in that timeframe, standard soundcards adopted support for hardware playback of mp3 files.

I had a Soundblaster 16 in the 486

That would be interesting to hear more about.

AFAIK all sound drivers in Windows accepted standard PCM data.

I'm not sure about that, but 'mmx' did come to fruition with early pentiums.

Wait a sec guys.. are you sure you had the turbo button on your machine active?

I used a Pentium 150MHz to play mp3s and do other stuff at the same time. It worked just fine. This was with Winamp in around 1997 I believe.

Seems about right; I could play mp3s on my Libretto 30, but only with the Fraunhofer decoder, Winamp wasn't quite optimised enough.

Yes, my point was specifically about videos, and I've elaborated on it further in the post above.

I, too, remember quite vividly waiting 30-40 minutes to download a 5MB installer for WinAmp and ICQ.

I honestly wouldn't even know where to look for videos in the 90s internet. Most people probably didn't have the upload speed to even consider sharing them online.

I think shockwave.com hosted Flash animated videos. Also, I remember downloading Troops from TheForce.net, seems like they had several other fan made videos. I also remember watching the Star Wars Episode I trailer on StarWars.com (I beleive it required the QuickTime plugin); so anyway, those are some sites hosting video content in the 90s.

I got some from Sony's BBS system where fan groups shared (links to) music videos.

> three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s

Ah Napster.

I remember my family's pre-PPC Mac could play MP2, but not MP3.

A Pentium II can play a DVD back at 24 fps back no problems.

That's because the pentium 2 chip isn't decoding the video. Try it with a software decoder some time. It hardly works. I had to disable video scaling before my 366 would stop dropping frames.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com