What was the first digital video you ever saw?

[lordsmurf]

The first digital video I ever saw was a .GL file (GRASP format), one of the first motion graphics formats in the 80s, for DOS. Playing the video required a command line tool (not too different from using modern ffmpeg.) The graphics were CGA, 4 whole colors! Blue, light blue, light gray, dark gray, so the video was really dark.

I was at a friend's house, and he said "check this out". It was his latest BBS download. I was expecting a game or something. I don't know what shocked me more: seeing a video on a computer, or seeing it was a softcore XXX clip. The video was maybe 5 seconds long and looped.

It was several years before I saw another video on a computer.

It wasn't until the late 90s that I could actually make digital video myself, using an SGI workstation, and the MediaBase streaming encoding software.

Both of these formats are so old that you can find scant info on them online today!

And then DVDs in 2001, when the DVD-R(G) format became available. I had a Pioneer 103 drive on preorder for months ($800+ burner drive!), along with the first AGP ATI AIW Radeon card ($300+).

[cygnals]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

The first digital video I ever saw was a .GL file

I don't know what shocked me more: seeing a video on a computer, or seeing it was a softcore XXX clip. The video was maybe 5 seconds long and looped.

I might've seen the same clip as my first digital video. I'd say about 1988, and the video was probably ontop.gl ... it filled an entire floppy disk -- might've required an expensive 1.2M high-density floppy for that one. IIRC, there were two of those files making the rounds at the time. They weren't even 4-color, the ones I saw ... they were monochrome, like a moving Macpaint picture. And, at the time, macpaint pictures were the smut of choice -- .gif was still a year or two away.

I've been trying to remember what format that video was in for at least the past year, so thanks for noting the .gl format. That filled in a mental gap.

The next time I remember digital video of any consequence was when I was working at a computer store in a mall, probably 1990ish. We'd get little demos on the Amiga that were really nifty for the time. That Amiga tech was squeezed into Commodore's doomed CDTV system, which we had on display near the front of the store ... tiny video clips in the CD-ROM encyclopedia were cool, but the bigger full-motion clips in some of the games were more impressive.

Then around 1993, I was back working at a computer store, and the Mac was running a loop of the famous 1984 ad ... and the Sega CD machine was on a loop running Marky Mark's make-a-music-video demo, burning a groove of "Good Vibrations" into a corner of my brain.

-- merged --

Found it.

http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/...TOP/index.html

Plus lots of history and more examples of DOS-era graphics & video:

https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Int...SCII/ascii.htm

[cbehr91]

The movie Twister on display at stores on the new DVD format in 1997.

[ehbowen]

I remember seeing the transport scene in the original Tron, when it came out, which was ballyhooed as the first Hollywood motion picture scene created entirely on a computer. I was a regular in the computer stores during the C-64 and Amiga 1000 days, so I saw my share of good computer graphic demos and then some. But the first one which really sticks in my mind was Steve Segal's "Dance of the Stumblers"...created with the same hardware AND software which I had just purchased!

Needless to say, I never came close to matching him....

At the risk of incurring the wrath of the admins for not attaching, I'll insert a YouTube link to it.

[NJRoadfan]

Likely the QuickTime video demos that came with a friend's circa 1992 Macintosh Performa 600. Back then, due to I/O and storage limitations, the best you'd get is QCIF resolution, a whopping 176x144 resolution at 15fps. Common codecs were Cinepak (always blocky and lousy color) and Intel Indeo. RLE was also commonly used as well due to its decoding speed. QVGA MPEG-1 video didn't really hit the scene until 1995 when the Pentium made software decoding of the massive "full motion" 352x240@30fps video a reality.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NJRoadfan

Likely the QuickTime video demos that came with a friend's circa 1992 Macintosh Performa 600.

I vaguely remember seeing an Amiga(?), with a color monitor (better than EGA, but was it entirely VGA?), and what looked to be a sort-of Mac(ish) OS. That was around 1991? It was at the base of a ham station, at a cell site tower (analog only era, 1G) several miles from civilization. It was owned by the cell site operator, nothing to do with the cell, but he apparently spent a lot of time there with his ham and computer. It had some color versions of games I'd only ever before seen in B&W. To this day, no idea what that was -- not that I've given it much though until now. I'm not sure if he showed us video demos or not.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NJRoadfan

"full motion" 352x240@30fps video a reality.

I remember arguments on whether 30fps was really needed, and 15fps was "good enough". I thought both were terrible, but at least 15fps was smoother without lag/chop when LAN streamed. That was during my SGI era, about 97.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ehbowen

I'll insert a YouTube link to it.

I don't remember ever seeing that. Neat!

[ehbowen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

I vaguely remember seeing an Amiga(?), with a color monitor (better than EGA, but was it entirely VGA?), and what looked to be a sort-of Mac(ish) OS. That was around 1991/92? It was at the base of a ham station, at a cell site tower (analog only era, 1G) several miles from civilization. It was owned by the cell site operator, nothing to do with the cell, but he apparently spent a lot of time there. It had some color versions of games I'd only ever before seen in B&W. To this day, no idea what that was -- not that I've given it much though until now. I'm not sure if he showed us video demos or not.

The early Amigas were intended to use RGBi (analog) moniitors, and predated VGA by almost two years. They used a DB-23 interface connector unique to Commodore. The Amiga was capable of generating 4096 colors, a quantum leap ahead of the CGA computers at the time. The color palette was only 16 colors in high resolution (640x400, but you could overscan) mode, or 32 colors at one time if you dropped down to 320x200, but they could show all 4096 colors at one time using a strange system called "Hold And Modify" (HAM mode). This entailed using a 16 color "base" palette and then using the additional bits to modify the base color in adjacent pixels.

The Amiga's designers had in mind video applications from the start, which is why they selected a 7.14 MHz system clock speed, exactly double the NTSC colorburst frequency. (PAL units were configured similarly to work with that system). They sold a "genlock" which allowed you to pipe live video onto your screen as "Color 0" and then overlay it with computer graphics in the other 15 or 31 colors. Interlaced mode was available and, in the early models, required if you wanted to obtain 400 lines of resolution...but the flicker in a computerized digital monitor display could be intense.

Can you tell I had one? I used the genlock only once (I bought the setup secondhand, and it came with the machine) and I really wasn't thrilled with the quality of the results, but, hey, it was a 'gee-whiz' feature back then. The 7.14 MHz clock and 32 bit architecture was screaming fast by comparison with the 4.77 MHz clock and 16 bit bus being used by IBM and compatible PCs at the time.

It was so far ahead of its time that nobody really knew what to do with it. Especially Commodore. RIP.

[NJRoadfan]

That genlocking capability is what made the NewTek Video Toaster possible on the Amiga. Most genlocking applications were just simple video overlay of computer graphics, mostly because the add-on hardware was simple. The folks at Newtek saw far more potential for it.

The biggest thing that hobbled the Amiga was Commodore itself. The company suffered from terrible management that bled the place dry and shortchanged engineering. Hearing the war stories from Dave Haynie (Commodore engineer that developed a ton of the Amiga architecture in later years) was quite fascinating. He did quite a bit with what little he got in terms of money for R&D.

Besides the Amiga, I also have a rare Apple II Video Overlay Card, mostly marketed to education for use in the Apple IIgs. It was really more of a "hey we got that too" offering because it got zero support from Apple after release. I don't think anyone was really asking for it either. Apple's vision for the card was to use something like Hypercard to create interactive applications to control LaserDisc players (RS-232 drivers for Pioneer players existed for the Apple II).

[dpalomaki]

I have an Amiga 500, a couple Commodore/Amiga monitors that provided essentially s-video inputs (via Y/C RCA jacks, not mini-DIN). They support NTSC input. One is essentially a JVC product, made in Japan in 1984 with Y/C the other from 1989 also supports RBG, and digital. I still use the monitors today for some work.

The Amiga system offered both text and GUI modes, great color, advanced audio, and graphics for the day, and a nice variety of games. Amiga Basic included the ability to "talk." One could enter phrases and it would speak the phrase with a choice of voices. It was based on the Motorola 6800-series chip, superior to the Intel of the day.

Speaking of 640x400 graphics, the AT&T PC6300 (essentially a rebadged Olivetti, also sold under the NCR label) and was an honest 8086-based 16-bit system with an 8 MHz clock (not the crippled 8088). It had came with CGA, but offered a display enhancement board option that gave it 640x400 16 color capability and had a "dithering" mode to produce additional colors on the screen.