MacFlim: Full-motion video on B&W Macs
macflim.com
macflim.com
This is the old video, I am finishing the techdemo that have sound, there is a video on youtube (https://youtu.be/YRe6I5AICJ0). I'll update the macflim.com website later today.
And yes, diskspace is one of the reason why it is impractical, but with a SCSI2SD, one can get 4 2Gb partitions on you mac for around $100.
And yes, it is bizarre and useles, hence absolutely necessary. If you have time, try the app, it is full of inside time-correct jokes.
I thought it was!!
very nice job anyway
I'd love to do a video with the explanations (or a talk), but I am still think about how to present this is a understandable and entertaining way.
Had a big grin watching your video.
Funny, I had a flash back to a high school chat. Friend had picked up on digital music. Sampling was a thing we all heard about and the chat was no noise, perfect music one can carry around on chips...
Seemed like sci-fi. We were using Apple 2 computers, some with a half megabyte of RAM. A CD held so much information!
It all just happened. Fairly quick too.
Kudos!
In both cases, there's lines of dots in wide dark spaces, as one would expect from an error-diffusion dither. Did you look into other approaches?
The example on the website are identical to the ones in the first video, as the simple looping gif is a by-product of the encoding.
On the second video (the one with sound), you cannot compare, as the video is compressed and not all the parts of the image are updated. But the algo is the same.
The swimmy bits come from the fact that I encode images using the preceeding one, and use the pixels from the preceeding images to "control" where the error gets diffused, to try to get some temporal stability in error diffusion (I have a long blog post that explains that, but I never got around finishing it, it seems people were more interested by having me coding sound).
I am not completely sure why the swim effect seems to always be in the north-west direction (I understand why pixels go in that diagonal, but no why they always seem to crawl on the top-left, and never the bottom-right).
The dithering code can be found in the encoder, on github:
https://github.com/fstark/macflim/blob/main/flimmaker.cpp#L3...
If you have other dithering ideas, let me know. I am happy with the one I have, which matches what I was looking for, but we never know. Also, for the compressed version (the one with sound), the dithering have a huge impact on the ability to play on slow machines.
(Btw, I tried ordered dithering, but I have always found it awful looking. Maybe in motion it would fare better?).
It might be an option to offer Ordered by a menu option?
I think there should be a clipping of the lower-grayscale coming into your filter. A black-point cut-off.
I think that would get rid of most of the "swimming pixels" in the very dark areas (would become completely black areas).
Some loss of detail of course in the dark areas ... but what details was there anyway?
This article on dithering made the rounds a few months ago, and was a fascinating read; the hilbert curve method at the end (Riemersma) might be a good fit and get rid of some of the line effects (if that's of interest). And the Atkinson error diffusion sounds like it even has some history in old macs.
https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/
There's a really nice blog post on video stable dithering in Return to the Obra Dinn, but in that case it's a 3d game, and they've got direct access to the scene geometry. I'm curious if there's a nice way to use video encoding pixel tracking vectors to reduce swimminess...
However, if anyone can help me getting my hands on some vintage hardware, that would be awesome (mac or non-mac, I have a few nasty software projects involving weird hardware).
[I'm ready to pay "normal" prices for those items, of course]
In particular, I am looking for a network card (for the next couple of years) for the SE/30, as I see streaming could be useful to a late 80's computer... :-) . I did found one, once, but the seller didn't ship outside of the US, and the time to organize, it went poof :-(
I also try to get my hands on a Performa/LC 575 motherboard to perform a Mystic upgrade of my Color Classic -- the goal being to see what kind of crazyness we could get on a top-of-the line color compact mac. Again, those things seems to be made of unobtainium, and probably hoarded by collectors...
A Turbo NeXT Cube would be awesome, but again, nowhere to be found...
Full color next? https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/rainbow/
Fun fact: the reason why macflim had no sound originally is that my SE30s have bad caps (like most), and no sound. So many people asked for sound that I had to recap those surface mount caps (ouch my eyes!) so I could actually hack a version with sound :-)
I love it too. Simple, fun, pretty robust hardware.
Early 16- and 256-color systems are great too, but pure B/W has that certain look to it.
Anyway, this is awesome!
If you got a MOV file with a MP4 video, OFC a G3 would struggle, but mplayer/mpv may be able to play it fastly if the resolution is under 720p if you skip the loop filter.
EDIT: Ok, just for G4 and up. Understandable.
Also, is NOT that impressive. You could watch XVid illegal rips just fine in 2002-2006.
Heck, even a Pentium 2@450 with NetBSD could do that seamlessly.
I thought that this particular video, using the 1984 ad I used, was a reply to my earlier macflim video :-)
That red skirt made me feel like Constable against Turner... https://www.brightreddot.org/objective/ ...
Of course, disk space is the immediate reason why it's so impractical.
Actually, did these guys have SCSI ports on the back? SCSI->USB or SCSI->TB4 would be an fun cable.
You can theoretically put anything you want on ADB, but you'd need drivers to do anything but mouse/keyboard, and Wikipedia lists the "actual" bitrate as 10 kbit/s.
It can emulate a floppy or hard drive. I tend to use a 2GB hard drive image which makes hacking on classic Mac a delight.
As I say on the link, you need either a real scsi disk, or, better an scsi emulator, like a SCSI2H https://store.inertialcomputing.com/SCSI2SD-s/100.htm, a RaSCSI https://www.tindie.com/products/landogriffin/rascsi-macintos..., a BlueSCSI https://gumroad.com/l/bluescsi-1b or a MacSD http://macsd.com/
The Mac(s) on the video have a SCSI2HD v5.5, with 4 2Gb partitions on a microsd. I can mount the first partition on my linux to copy stuff onto it (in general via the minivmac emulator).
Watching youtube videos in 1-bit is an amazing aesthetic. Unfortunately all of my videos of it were on vine, so this Muybridge-esque cat video seems to be the only one that I cross-posted to twitter: https://twitter.com/qrs/status/1045272076750401536
Surprised these are still ~$100-200 ... that's a bargain.
I've been looking for an accelerator board for my mac SE, but can't find anything reasonably priced anywhere...
A few weeks ago I saw that there is a guy making carts that play 80's movies on Atari 2600's.
(The quality of the movies is terrible, but it's a fascinating project. And the carts and boxes look real.)
You planted an idea in my brain that may lead to the complete re-development of the whole thing. 3 colors? That would be the middle link between the Original Mac and the Original NeXT !
Still: love to see this!
Memories are a bit weak, so I might be misremembering some of this. But I do clearly remember full screen videos dropping a ton of frames. I used to put full screen videos up when I had parties (computer video was still a novelty and it made for a nice backdrop as people danced/drank) and it was 5 fps at best on that poor underpowered machine.
I was just reacting to how everything here seems to emphasize the “it does b&w dither video” aspect over the “large format and high frame rate” aspect.
I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that Quicktime on a SE/30 was not able to display fullscreen videos at 24 fps. Also, the dithering used in QuickTime was an ordered dithering, which IMO is pretty ugly and eats details.
Kudos!