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Comment by dan353hehe | Hacker News Reader

At the time, the mocking was well deserved. I remember downloading trailers for moves over my dial-up connection. Took the entire night for 3 minutes of video. Can’t imagine paying $5k for that privilege.

Today though, the mocking doesn’t make sense and is confusing. I haven’t ever owned a TV.

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By 99 it wasn't that bad. I remember screaming along with V.92 56k modems. Futurama episodes were about 50mb encoded as RealVideo and took a mere two and a half hours to download o.0

(and it really was v.92; I still have the double-bong towards the end of the handshake emblazoned in my memory)

Realmovies were the new hotness, evolution of video piracy was >vivoactive is the OG (stream only format, like 50x50 pixels, NO KEYFRAMES - no fast forward, rewind, or seeking), talking about 1995 here >realmovies - higher quality, seeking, around 1998 >DIVX (format, not the discs also at the same time) - mindblowing quality update, around 2000 >VCDs - concurrent with DIVX around 2000 >XVID - (DIVX backwards) arose as DIVX failed, 2001 >then wherever we are now, 9999 formats and VLC supports them all

I downloaded episodes of South Park using eMule over dial-up. It took days.

Well back then there was a huge difference in the Internet experience between people at universities and other places with T1s and other fast connections, and everyone else on dial-up. There was a lot of full-length video downloading at universities by 2000. But even on dial-up I seem to remember realplayer and other UDP dumps being pretty popular around this time.

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