# Compress video to fit on 1.44MB floppy?



## RealKGB (Nov 23, 2020)

Picking up an old quest to put the first Pewds video I ever watched on a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disk (LWIAY).
Yes, I know it is on the LTT and Tom's Hardware forum already. Ignore those.
it's the Cool Cat Cringe Tuesdays video. Don't ask, because I don't know.
I have managed to get it to 4.8MB with a 64x48 resolution and fish tank audio.
Any advice/ideas?
I can attach the base file and my current progress if you would like.


----------



## sam_86314 (Nov 23, 2020)

Try a better video codec like H265 and make the audio as low quality and mono as possible.


----------



## RealKGB (Nov 23, 2020)

I forgot it was still on stereo. Oops!
And I will try h.265.


----------



## wiak (Nov 23, 2020)

use opus at its lowest setting with mono and voice, av1 can also make it small, it also depends on the length of the video


----------



## Kissamies (Nov 23, 2020)

Heh, reminds me when I browsed through my mp3s to find some to put on a diskette (one track per diskette). Kinda fun to see how it seeks from time to time as it loads to buffer.


----------



## wiak (Nov 23, 2020)

Chloe Price said:


> Heh, reminds me when I browsed through my mp3s to find some to put on a diskette (one track per diskette). Kinda fun to see how it seeks from time to time as it loads to buffer.


----------



## johnspack (Nov 23, 2020)

Poor little floppy drives.  I had so much fun with them.  One computer in college only had 2 5 1/4 floppy drives,  you had to boot dos from one and then 
run the app from the other.  Later on I'd use special formatting utils to get 1.8ish mbs out of a 1.44mb 3.5" floppy.  Could do so much with floppies back then....


----------



## Athlonite (Nov 23, 2020)

johnspack said:


> Later on I'd use special formatting utils to get 1.8ish mbs out of a 1.44mb 3.5" floppy



That's something MS used to do with their floppies always the first disk was 1.88MB and the rest were standard 1.44MB especially their 98 enhancement pack


----------



## dorsetknob (Nov 23, 2020)

Best 3 1/2" Floppy for Capacity was the LS120 pity CD/RW killed the idea and yeh still got a Drive and 5 LS120 Disks
It works over a IDE Docking Station


----------



## Chomiq (Nov 23, 2020)

Chloe Price said:


> Heh, reminds me when I browsed through my mp3s to find some to put on a diskette (one track per diskette). Kinda fun to see how it seeks from time to time as it loads to buffer.


I used to zip them and put them on multiple floppies. Oh the horror when CRC check failed.


----------



## SomeOne99h (Nov 23, 2020)

Chomiq said:


> I used to zip them and put them on multiple floppies. Oh the horror when CRC check failed.


You call that horror? When of my pals in university back in those days, was supposed to handle his assignment to the professor, when he tried to open the floppy, the file is gone. How and why? we don't know. And he didn't bother to save the file first in his computer. He saved it directly into the floppy .....


----------



## sam_86314 (Mar 1, 2021)

Bit of a necrobump, I know, but it's relevant to the topic.

Someone crammed a 4-minute LGR video onto a 3.5" floppy, and LGR himself featured it in a video today.











__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/LGR/comments/lq0z51

Modern video compression is truly incredible.


----------



## delshay (Mar 1, 2021)

I have which must be super rare Amiga External floppy drive with built-in track counter. I can dig it out & post photo if I get enough request,


----------



## Regeneration (Mar 1, 2021)

Resize to 320x240, use 2.88MB floppy, or use several diskettes.


----------



## dorsetknob (Mar 1, 2021)

Regeneration said:


> Resize to 320x240, use 2.88MB floppy, or use several diskettes.


Or just use LS120


----------



## qubit (Mar 1, 2021)

delshay said:


> I have which must be super rare Amiga External floppy drive with built-in track counter. I can dig it out & post photo if I get enough request,


I'd like to see it, please.   I've got a bunch of friends who are Amiga enthusiasts.


----------



## delshay (Mar 3, 2021)

qubit said:


> I'd like to see it, please.   I've got a bunch of friends who are Amiga enthusiasts.



OK.  It won't be long as I'm testing something (with-in one day). If I remember correctly, It's made by "Golden Image".., I also have the rare 3 button optical mouse made by the same company, for amiga.


----------



## Faux_Grey (Mar 3, 2021)

This guy on reddit called GreedyPaint made a codec to compress the original shrek movie to fit on a 1.44 which I thought was impressive.

__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/kkzpuk


----------



## Hardcore Games (Mar 10, 2021)

USB sticks are cheaper than floppy disks and hold more


----------



## Toothless (Mar 10, 2021)

Hardcore Games said:


> USB sticks are cheaper than floppy disks and hold more


Good thing that's not the point of the thread.


----------



## RealKGB (Mar 10, 2021)

Hardcore Games said:


> USB sticks are cheaper than floppy disks and hold more


I know that.
I have a whole bunch of varying sizes - 867MB, 1GB, 2GB, 8GB.
But that's not what I'm asking.


----------



## Hardcore Games (Mar 10, 2021)

i divested of floppies so long ago its Unreal









						UNREAL
					

Unreal was released on April 30, 1998 by GT Interactive. The game was developed by Epic Games. Unreal is a first person shooter. The player takes on the role of prisoner 849. The transport crashes on an unknown planet. The ship ended up on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, home of ...




					www.hardcoregames.ca


----------



## hat (Mar 10, 2021)

Err, what does that have to do with floppies, again?


----------



## Mussels (Mar 11, 2021)

Stay on topic please


it's a weird topic, but lets stay on it


----------



## Mescalamba (Mar 11, 2021)

IMHO, this would need some codec that can basically re-create image with some help of machine learning. We not there yet.

Or you can go h.265 way with very low FPS + very low res+ as big GOP as you can + adaptive quantization near max (before it breaks image).

VHS of old actually had rather decent capacity, if you would convert it to "data". Probably reason why magnetic tapes are still a thing today. While 1.44 floppy aint.


----------



## Hardcore Games (Mar 11, 2021)

I looked on eBay and there are USB floppy drives but no need for them as BIOS can be updated via USB sticks

maybe some old machine that needs repair but nothing like that in years


----------



## Hachi_Roku256563 (Mar 11, 2021)

Hardcore Games said:


> I looked on eBay and there are USB floppy drives but no need for them as BIOS can be updated via USB sticks
> 
> maybe some old machine that needs repair but nothing like that in years


what does this have to do with anything
he wants to get a video on a floppy


----------



## Toothless (Mar 11, 2021)

Hardcore Games said:


> I looked on eBay and there are USB floppy drives but no need for them as BIOS can be updated via USB sticks
> 
> maybe some old machine that needs repair but nothing like that in years


Again, that's not the point of the thread. Please stop pushing the thread off topic.


----------



## Hardcore Games (Mar 11, 2021)

1.44 MB is a serious constraint in video capacity even at MPEG-1 video CD compression levels


----------



## Mussels (Mar 11, 2021)

Hardcore Games said:


> 1.44 MB is a serious constraint in video capacity even at MPEG-1 video CD compression levels


thats the point, its a demonstration of extreme compression - i'd love to hear how the OP has gone


----------



## Hardcore Games (Mar 11, 2021)

H.265 with a resolution of 320x200 might fit a few seconds

AVI in the old days could fit a short loop on a floppy such as as flame that I had in a AVI coop


----------



## RealKGB (Mar 11, 2021)

Bit of an update (it's been interesting reading your discussions on this):
I decided to separate the audio and video streams and I the video to 20x12 at 1027 KB, and the audio to 1321 KB.
I don't have a way to put them together without ballooning the file size, and VLC has proven to be annoying - I can play the two files on each other but I can't extract it.
If you'd like to mess around with the files, I've attached them in a .zip.


----------



## MIRTAZAPINE (Mar 11, 2021)

I wonder if rather than digital recording on floppy would putting an analog recording maybe push allow for video to be fit in. I am imagining analog tapes vs digital tapes not sure if it could be done diskette.

Edit : The earliest hd video was in the japan back in the 1980 full hd video/HDVS is analog with Muse or Multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding. This allows full hd video to played during a time where digital storage was not even possible.


----------



## oobymach (Mar 11, 2021)

Back in the days of dial up internet when we actually used floppy disks I used winzip or winrar to split audio files over several disks (school computers didn't have cd burners in the 90's).

I can only imagine how bad a short youtube video would be on a single disk let alone a full length film like Shrek.


----------



## qubit (Mar 11, 2021)

MIRTAZAPINE said:


> I wonder if rather than digital recording on floppy would putting an analog recording maybe push allow for video to be fit in. I am imagining analog tapes vs digital tapes not sure if it could be done diskette.
> 
> Edit : The earliest hd video was in the japan back in the 1980 full hd video/HDVS is analog with Muse or Multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding. This allows full hd video to played during a time where digital storage was not even possible.


You'd have to redesign the floppy drive to put out a bias signal and then the media may not respond properly anyway. The short answer is no.

It's interesting to see how far HD video goes back. I made a post on here some time back of a YouTube video of a digital HD demo video taken in 1993 of New York. Picture is a bit soft, but otherwise looks great.


----------



## yotano211 (Mar 11, 2021)

ragnarok0275 said:


> I know that.
> I have a whole bunch of varying sizes - 867MB, 1GB, 2GB, 8GB.
> But that's not what I'm asking.


I have 1.2tb of storage on my phone.


----------



## MIRTAZAPINE (Mar 11, 2021)

qubit said:


> You'd have to redesign the floppy drive to put out a bias signal and then the media may not respond properly anyway. The short answer is no.
> 
> It's interesting to see how far HD video goes back. I made a post on here some time back of a YouTube video of a digital HD demo video taken in 1993 of New York. Picture is a bit soft, but otherwise looks great.



It a passing thought. I saw the 1993 new york video, I am surprised how sharp it was. It looks so surreal seeing people looking like people today so clearly minus the smartphones.


----------



## qubit (Mar 11, 2021)

MIRTAZAPINE said:


> It a passing thought. I saw the 1993 new york video, I am surprised how sharp it was. It looks so surreal seeing people looking like people today so clearly minus the smartphones.


Yeah and the subtly dated styles, too. The Twin Towers were there, too. Produced a bit of a pang that did. It’s a real window into the past. Anyway, this is a bit off topic.


----------



## RealKGB (Jan 27, 2022)

Arise...
ARISE!!!!
I've gotten the thing down to 4.8MB at 268x160.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tyaF0dKpHGfr1NHPiONBxYgcSV3otfdK/view?usp=sharing
Annnd that's where I've gotten stuck.

Any thoughts?


----------



## Regeneration (Jan 27, 2022)

Use HEVC


----------



## qubit (Jan 27, 2022)

RealKGB said:


> Arise...
> ARISE!!!!
> I've gotten the thing down to 4.8MB at 268x160.
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tyaF0dKpHGfr1NHPiONBxYgcSV3otfdK/view?usp=sharing
> ...


Better codec and reduce the resolution further. If you went to a quarter (134x80) I'll bet it will fit. It will look terrible of course, but looking good isn't the aim here. Good luck, looking forward to it!


----------



## kruk (Jan 27, 2022)

RealKGB said:


> Arise...
> ARISE!!!!
> I've gotten the thing down to 4.8MB at 268x160.
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tyaF0dKpHGfr1NHPiONBxYgcSV3otfdK/view?usp=sharing
> ...



Try to convert it to ASCII and then use 7zip, rar or cmix on the resulting file: https://github.com/joelibaceta/video-to-ascii
Good luck


----------



## Chrispy_ (Jan 27, 2022)

Presumably an ancient codec from the dial-up days is what you need. Modern codecs are about optimising for high resolutions and framerates.

Did you try something designed to compress potato quality down to turd quality like RealMedia, RatDVD, Indeo, VP3?


----------



## RealKGB (Jan 27, 2022)

kruk said:


> Try to convert it to ASCII and then use 7zip, rar or cmix on the resulting file: https://github.com/joelibaceta/video-to-ascii
> Good luck


That's not what I'm trying to accomplish; I want to be able to pop this into any PC and just play the MP4.


qubit said:


> Better codec and reduce the resolution further. If you went to a quarter (134x80) I'll bet it will fit. It will look terrible of course, but looking good isn't the aim here. Good luck, looking forward to it!


I tried dropping it to 64x36 and it went down to 4.3MB, which is still sizable, but not as much as I was hoping. I think I'm hitting the point of diminishing returns now.


Chrispy_ said:


> Did you try something designed to compress potato quality down to turd quality like RealMedia, RatDVD, Indeo, VP3?


No, I've had to use online tools and it's a game of finding which one drops it just a bit more.

Here's the point I've reached.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QAKaFazb5QrhgdCZGAbFYnhyXy_qfkf6/view?usp=sharing
I hesitate to call this a video.


----------



## elghinnarisa (Jan 27, 2022)

oh dear lord: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11xvBw0R4fQhbIK-VHZw45R3MR6YDvOWn/view?usp=sharing
Well it is only 1.33MB large, you can't really expect much of anything watchable.

Either way, when you get down to such low bitrates you run in to the issue that there is quite a lot of overhead. In fact, the global tags and other metadata entries made up almost 40% of the whole filesize. Stripping them from the file made it significantly smaller. So thats something you have to do as well for these things.
Here is the output of ffmpeg from one of the previous attempts, as one can see we already have a alot of overhead to deal with, and the audio is massive.


```
frame=13518 fps=227 q=0.0 Lsize=    1899kB time=00:22:31.70 bitrate=  11.5kbits/s dup=0 drop=27033 speed=22.7x
video:630kB audio:786kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 34.056271%
```

The video does fit in under 640k so that ougha be enough for anyone, right?
This was also done with a lower framerate, hence so many of them that are dropped.

Of course, calling it a video at this point isn't really proper, the bitrate is so low it simply doesn't function properly anymore. If it was shorter, lets say 10 or 14 minutes long, you could definetly get something that is questionably watchable.
Cleaving the audio from it would also help, seeing as it is more than half the filesize currently.

Either way for a video this long, 1351 seconds, you can only have a maximum of ~8 kbits per second overall bitrate to fit in 1.44 floppy.

This example was made with these arguments: -r 10 -c:v libx265 -minrate 1k -b:v 1k -maxrate 2k -vf scale=132:-1 -c:a libopus -ac 1 -ar 8000 -b:a 1k
And then mkvtoolnix to strip some metadata from it, which got it down from 1619k to 1369k


----------



## qubit (Feb 8, 2022)

OMG the video is awesome in full screen upscaled to 4K!  

But seriously, it's amazing you could get this onto a floppy at all. Nice. 

I wondered why the picture only changed every few seconds and then realised that this was the framerate. No reason frames per second can't be seconds per frame!


----------



## Mussels (Feb 8, 2022)

watching that video is banned by the geneva convention


----------



## dorsetknob (Feb 9, 2022)

qubit said:


> I wondered why the picture only changed every few seconds and then realised that this was the framerate. No reason frames per second can't be seconds per frame!


Frame rate is perfect for Sloths and snails (maybe )
it may find a use in amateur radio   they can use slow scan Transmission of Video (SSTV)


----------



## elghinnarisa (Feb 9, 2022)

qubit said:


> OMG the video is awesome in full screen upscaled to 4K!
> 
> But seriously, it's amazing you could get this onto a floppy at all. Nice.
> 
> I wondered why the picture only changed every few seconds and then realised that this was the framerate. No reason frames per second can't be seconds per frame!


The framerate was actually set to 10FPS, as seen by "-r 10". However at these bitrates, or rather the lack of them. It simply stops functioning properly. One could probably set the framerate at something lower, 3 or maybe even 1. More bits per image and all that, should produce a "better" result. But I got lazy and already gone through quite a few attempts.

Had to use x265 though, vp9 simply does not allow you to set rates that low, its minimum values are too high to fit them in to something so small. Or at least for a video this long.

If one had gone for a 2.88MB floppy the results would probably be significantly better, for obvious reasons. Though I would say you need around 6-8MB to get something arguably viewable. In the sense that you can see whats happening on the video and you can hear clearly enough to understand what they say. Functional, in other words.

Quicktime video (.mov/.qt) or realvideo (.rv/.rm) might be able to get some interesting results, but I was too lazy to see if ffmpeg had support for those encoders. Something aimed at the good old 56k modem era perhaps. Although if it was allowed up to 56k bitrate, it would be "significantly" better, just wouldn't fit on 1.44MB anymore.
Wonder if it would be possible to split audio and video on to two separate floppies and play them back simultaneously on a machine with dual drives? That would give you 1.44MB for video and 1.44MB for audio.


----------



## RealKGB (Feb 9, 2022)

elghinnarisa said:


> Wonder if it would be possible to split audio and video on to two separate floppies and play them back simultaneously on a machine with dual drives? That would give you 1.44MB for video and 1.44MB for audio.


I did mess around with separating, destroying, and splicing together the video and audio streams but it always ballooned larger than I wanted.
Could probably be done now that I have better tools to use though.


----------



## elghinnarisa (Feb 9, 2022)

RealKGB said:


> I did mess around with separating, destroying, and splicing together the video and audio streams but it always ballooned larger than I wanted.
> Could probably be done now that I have better tools to use though.


If you don't already use it, ffmpeg is the way to go generally. That and MKVtoolnix is what I use the most for video modification in one way or another. FFmpeg requires you to be comfortable with a commandline but its generally quite simple, great tool in general. Also used in the backend of most common tools, like handbrake or the like.

The arguments I listed in my post were what I fed in to ffmpeg to get the result seen, should be repeatable with the same source and a good base for further tweaking.


----------



## InVasMani (Feb 10, 2022)

Chomiq said:


> I used to zip them and put them on multiple floppies. Oh the horror when CRC check failed.


That zip approach would be interesting with a USB floppy emulator. I wonder how far you could apply that kind of approach.


----------



## caroline! (Feb 11, 2022)

elghinnarisa said:


> oh dear lord: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11xvBw0R4fQhbIK-VHZw45R3MR6YDvOWn/view?usp=sharing
> Well it is only 1.33MB large, you can't really expect much of anything watchable.





Mussels said:


> watching that video is banned by the geneva convention


>mfw you transformed a random vid from a cringeworthy youtuber into a broken transmission from an abandoned ship derelict from a space horror movie





>the first 2 seconds
>the gibberish singing at 05:38
>watched it all for some reason
>perfect 5/7 rating. made my night.


----------

