At a time when you have to go out of your way to buy a new TV with a resolution below 4K, a Redditor has decided that his eyes don’t need luxuries like 4K, 2K, HD or even standard definition videos, and have has created a custom VCR which plays for the entire duration movies on floppy disks with only 1.44 MB of storage.
For comparison, an Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc has a dual-layer capacity of 66 GB to store movies at 4K resolutions, while a single-layer Blu-ray Disc can hold 25 GB, enough to hold a movie at HD resolutions. DVDs, which store videos at standard definition resolutions, have a storage capacity of 4.7 GB, or 4,700 MB, and even photos in ProRAW format on an iPhone 12 Pro are between 25 and 40 MB in size. . Trying to squeeze a 90 minute movie into just 1.44 MB seems like a pointless act, but when has that prevented someone on the internet from doing anything?
Achievement of GreedyPaint, if you want to call it that, is actually a two-part hack. The most important piece is a custom x265 video codec which crushes video files up to 120 x 96 pixel resolutions at four frames per second. Shrek, as shown in video they shared on Reddit, actually compressed to only 1.37 MB, including the audio of the movie which, as you might probably expect, is a task for both the viewer’s ears and the compressed video for their eyes.
The other part of this hack is a custom VCR built around a Raspberry Pi with a floppy drive instead of a VHS cassette slot. The LimaTek Diskmaster even starts with a home screen with the player’s corporate brand and is programmed to automatically play the video file stored on an inserted floppy disk. Instead of a modern flat screen TV, the Diskmaster was connected to a small old school CRT TV that probably helped soften and hide many of the ugliest compression artifacts in the video file, but watch the whole movie. film this way would be worse than watching it in Full HD, which is already a bit of a chore.
While GreedyPaint has no intention of trying to put the LimaTek Diskmaster into production (clearly they’ve done their market research and realized that few people even consider spending money on it), there are a few ways interesting to improve it, including passing the small video Make a signal through a machine learning algorithm to see if the image quality and frame rate can be increased and improved to resolutions that do not leave the agonists eyes of the spectators.
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