[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.