At a time when you have to go out of your way to buy a new TV with less than 4K resolution, a Redditor decided that your eyes don’t need luxuries like 4K, 2K, HD or even standard definition videos, and have created a custom VCR that touches the total length floppy disk movies with just 1.44 MB of storage.
For comparison, a Blu-ray Ultra HD disc has a 66 GB dual-layer capacity for storing movies in 4K resolutions, while a single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold 25 GB, which is enough to store a movie in HD resolutions. DVDs, which store videos in standard definition resolutions, have a storage capacity of 4.7 GB or 4,700 MB, and even photos taken in ProRAW format on an iPhone 12 Pro are 25 to 40 MB in size. Trying to squeeze a 90-minute movie into just 1.44 MB seems like an act of futility, but when has that ever stopped someone on the Internet from doing anything?
Realization of GreedyPaint, if you want to call it that, it’s actually a two-part hack. The most important piece is a custom x265 video codec which reduces video files to resolutions of 120 x 96 pixels, running at four frames per second. Shrek, as presented in a video that they shared on Reddit, actually compressed to just 1.37 MB, including the audio from the movie which, as you can probably expect, is just as much work for the viewer’s ears as the compressed video for the eyes.
The other part of this hack is a custom VCR built around a Raspberry Pi with a floppy drive in place of a VHS tape slot. LimaTek Diskmaster even starts with a splash screen with the player’s corporate brand and is programmed to automatically play the video file stored on an inserted floppy disk. Instead of a modern flat-screen TV, Diskmaster was connected to a small old CRT TV that probably helped to soften and hide many of the ugliest compression artifacts in the video file, but watching the entire movie this way would be considerably worse than to watch in full HD – which is already kind of a chore.
Although GreedyPaint has no intention of trying to put the LimaTek Diskmaster into production (they clearly did their market research and realized that few people would consider spending money on it), there are some interesting ways to improve it, including the passage of the short video signal by using a machine learning algorithm to see if image quality and frame rate can be increased and enhanced to resolutions that don’t leave the viewer’s eyes in agony.
G / O Media can receive a commission