At a time when you have to work out to buy a new TV with a resolution of less than 4K, one Redditor decided that their eyes do not need such luxuries as 4K, 2K, HD or even standard def videos, and it created a personal video recorder playing full length movies on disk with just 1.44 MB of storage.
For comparison: an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc has a 66 GB dual-layer capacity for storing movies with 4K resolutions, while a single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold 25 GB, which is enough to ‘ to keep a movie with HD resolutions. DVDs, which store videos with standard definition resolutions, have a storage capacity of 4.7 GB, or 4,700 MB, and even photos recorded in ProRAW format on an iPhone 12 Pro recording take about 25 to 40 MB big in. Trying to print a movie that lasts 90 minutes to just 1.44 MB seems pointless, but when did anyone on the internet ever stop to do something?
GreedyPaint’s performance, if you want to call it that, is actually a two-part hack. The most important piece is a use x265 video codec which crushes video files to 120 x 96 pixel resolutions at four frames per second. Shrek, as in a video they shared on Reddit, actually compressed to just 1.37 MB, including the sound of the movie which, as you can probably expect, is just as much of a hassle for the viewer’s ears as the compressed video is to their eyes.
The other part of this hack is a custom VCR built around a Raspberry Pi with a floppy disk instead of a VHS cassette slot. The LimaTek Diskmaster even starts with a splash screen with the player’s operating marks, and it is programmed to play the video file that is on an installed diskette automatically. Instead of a modern flat screen TV, the Diskmaster was connected to a small old-school CRT TV that could probably soften and hide many of the ugliest artifacts from the video file, but watching the whole movie like that would be significantly worse be than to look. it in full HD – which is already a kind of work.
While GreedyPaint does not intend to try to put the LimaTek Diskmaster into production (they clearly did their market research and realized that few people would even consider spending money on it), there are interesting ways it can be improved, including the transmission of the small video gives a signal by means of a machine learning algorithm to see if the image quality and the image speed can be increased and improved to resolutions that do not hurt the viewer.
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