[arowthway]

"each MP4 file was likely to be about 3GB. (...) Also, it’s not easy to watch a file like that. You’d need to download the entire file first to even be able to watch it"

I dont think that's true? Even with moov atom at the end of the file, browsers just figure it out, as long as the server supports http range requests. And I suspect the size could be much smaller, given the low resolution of Video8 footage, but maybe author did the reasearch and compression would take too much time.

[maybewhenthesun]

That depends on the specific MP4 I think. My camera creates MP4s which are completely unwatchable without the ending. I found out the hard way when the battery died while recording my children's school play.

The only way I could save the file was to create a new movie with the exact same camera settings (luckily I hadn't changed anything on the camera) and graft the ending of the newly created mp4 onto the old one using some special utility a hero on the internet had created.

[necovek]

In general, some tools like mplayer or VLC allow playing an MP4 file without an "index", but may require certain CLI arguments.

There are tools which can fix that too (was it mconvert from mplayer or ffmpeg, not sure).