At a time when you have to go out of your way to buy a new TV with less than 4K resolution, a Redditor has decided that their eyes don’t need luxuries like 4K, 2K, HD or even standard def videos, and have made a custom video recorder that plays full-length movies on floppy disks with only 1.44 MB of storage space.
In comparison, an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc has a dual layer capacity of 66 GB for storing movies with 4K resolutions, while a single layer Blu-ray disc can hold 25 GB, which is enough for a movie with HD resolutions. DVDs, which store videos at standard definition resolutions, have a storage capacity of 4.7 GB or 4700 MB, and even photos taken in the ProRAW format on an iPhone 12 Pro take up 25 to 40 MB. Trying to squeeze a 90 minute movie into just 1.44MB seems useless, but when has that ever stopped anyone on the Internet from doing anything?
GreedyPaint’s achievement, if you want to call it that, it’s actually a two-part hack. The most important part is a habit x265 video codec that crushes video files to resolutions of 120 x 96 pixels at four frames per second. Shrek, as seen in one video they shared on Reddit, actually compressed to just 1.37MB, including the movie’s audio which, as you can probably expect, is just as good to the viewer’s ears as the compressed video is to their eyes.
The other part of this hack is a custom video recorder built around a Raspberry Pi with a floppy drive instead of a VHS cassette slot. The LimaTek Diskmaster even starts with a start-up screen with the invented house style of the player and is programmed to automatically play the video file stored on an inserted floppy disk. Rather than a modern flat screen TV, the Diskmaster was hooked up to a small old-school CRT TV which probably helped soften and hide many of the video file’s ugliest compression artifacts, but viewing the entire movie this way would be significantly worse are then watching it in full HD – which is quite a job.
While GreedyPaint does not intend to attempt to put the LimaTek Diskmaster into production (they clearly did their market research and realized few people would consider spending money on this), there are some interesting ways to get it. including passing the small video signal through a machine learning algorithm to see if the image quality and frame rate can be increased and improved to resolutions that won’t hurt the viewer’s eyes.
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