@foone of course the 1-click solution would be to dive into China’s basement of VideoCD (VCD) collections from the 1990s and just buy the movie … though that’s still vaguely equivalent to “bad VHS”

@foone ooooh petty? Like extremely geekily petty?

I think the true benchmark is dialup video, as invented by RealPlayer / RealMedia. It might take one or two layers of emulation and/or pre-conversion to get it encoded, but I think an “.rm” file can still be opened by VLC VideoLAN

28.8k dialup meant a 24kbps total stream, with about 16 for video and 8 for audio. The video would have been about 80x60 — and loads of macroblocking within that, not a GIF level quality — with a variable frame rate depending on “motion energy”, but a nominal (maximum) rate of 8fps. But often dropping to 1fps or 0.5fps when action got Their RealPlayer client did some fun motion blurring, “tweening” frames to make this limit less painful.

@foone ooh we’re in my wheelhouse, this sounds fun

Have you even tried some ancient codecs from the MPEG-2 era, like Sorenson codec? Probably better just to go for H.261 instead.

I think you went the wrong way by removing stereo — that makes it easier to maintain quality. (Same could be said for pixels instead of bitrate, I guess). Just go for all those joint-stereo hacks.

Heh you’re not trying to reverse-engineer YouTube’s content ID by any chance? 🫠

@mekkaokereke @Badgardener @thisismissem If Twitter was sold at a free and fair price, wouldn’t it be closer to $5b though?