Oh hey, I'd forgotten you wrote pizzatool! Do you wish ScriptX had been free software?
But it included Apple's "crown jewels", the QuickTime player source code, and they were't going to give that away in 1995. Apple were even trepidatious about IBM having access to that source code.
Besides having proprietary decoders, it could also do some things you can't even do well with the Flash player or html video component today: like smoothly playing videos and music backwards!
Ever since the music industry switched from vinyl to CD, listening to demonic backmasking in Devil Music like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin's promotion of Satanism became much less convenient. ScriptX solved that important problem elegantly with its synchronized clock system, but today's HTML video player still hasn't, alas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BDh_j5qAJ4
Here's a description of ScriptX's clock system:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350511
>Kaleida Lab's ScriptX (a multimedia programing language kinda like Dylan with classes) had built-in support for hierarchal clocks within the container (in the sense of "window" not "vm") hierarchy. The same way every window or node has a 2D or 3D transformation matrix, each clock has a time scale and offset relative to its parent, so anything that consumes time (like a QuickTime player, or a simulation) runs at the scaled and offset time that it inherits from through its parent containers. And you can move and scale each container around in time as necessary, to pause movies or simulations.) You could even set the scale to a negative number, and it played QuickTime movies backwards! (That was pretty cool in 1995 -- try playing a movie backwards in the web browser today!)
Is it possible to play HTML5 video in reverse?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5277293/is-it-possible-t...
Kinda, but it's not smooth enough to sing along while dancing backwards and worshiping Satan to:
I think there's a lot of space for experimentation here, generating video as an arbitrary three-dimensional slice of a potentially higher-dimensional space — like how horse-race photo-finish cameras map one vertical spatial dimension and one temporal dimension into two spatial dimensions for the photo, or how Julia-set animations map two of the dimensions of the four-dimensional Julibrot onto screen space while mapping a smooth path through the other two dimensions onto time. I've gotten some stunning still images by taking even fixed horizontal or vertical slices through video, but you could also do things like delay one side of the picture more than the other, or foreshadow future action by curving part of the frame into a timelike angle through the source material. It might be difficult to record a source video with more than one temporal dimension with a camera, but you can certainly do it with ray-tracing or other rendering techniques.
Presumably if you want to play a video backward with a modern codec, you need to buffer up decoded P-frames in memory from at least the previous I-frame — much like iterating backwards over the lines in a file, except that each "character" is a megabyte or two of YUV pixels. Should be totally feasible on a modern cellphone, even for aggressive modern formats that only have I-frames every few seconds… but it would be nothing short of a miracle in 1995! I guess MPEG-2 didn't exist yet, so maybe MPEG-1 with N=18, M=2 was the worst case you'd need to handle at that point? That should only require a 10-P-and-I-frame buffer.