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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I understand what’s new here: I remember watching early QuickTime video on my SE30 and marveling that it managed to convert on the fly to dithered B&W.

Still: love to see this!

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Are you sure?

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.

Oh gosh no — not full screen or full frame rate. As I mentioned in another response, “full motion” in my head did not translate to “full screen” so the claim emphasis (again, in my head) was more on the “(dithered) b&w video on old Macs” aspect.

Kudos!

Maybe the difference is smooth full screen playback? I remember the early QT too, and used it on my old LC. Playback was mostly ok (15 fps or so) at 320x240 (think that was the resolution) but would strain if I increased the size.

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.

Yeah having used many Macs from that era even a species out II series Mac would have a lot of stuttering playing any video larger than about 320x240, and definitely nowhere near 24 FPS.

Oh, definitely: video on the SE30 was maybe 100x60 pixels? And as you say, not 30fps.

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.

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