[everfrustrated]

I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.

Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)

[phire]

> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup

Sure you could.

Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)

I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.

I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.

The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.

[olyjohn]

I remember getting my hands on a rip of Titanic, burned onto 3 CD-ROMs in 1997/1998 before it was released to video. I used the CD burner at school to sell copies to other students, and got in trouble for it lol. Just having a copy of the movie before it was released was really something.

I just went through a bunch of old CDs that had DivX rips on them a couple of years ago. Binders with hundreds of CDs. I thought that they would still look decent and I was going to back them up... back to my hard drive. But no they were really terrible. I donated the binder to Goodwill, hoping that someone might find the surprise...

They were fine when you had a CRT TV to play them on, we even had a DVD player from LiteOn that would play DivX videos back then.

[beart]

Yeah... Farscape took quite a long time to download on 56K.

[acuozzo]

> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup

I downloaded a shit-ton of anime over 56k via CuteMX in 2000. I used to start the download before bed and then watch the episode the next day after school.

Little 12fps postage-stamp-sized RealPlayer/RealMedia video files. I still have them if you want to check them out.