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plumpan
@plumpan

iBook G4 and Thinkpad both showing the N64 N

So I'm sure you've tried sending screenshots of your n64 to friends, but why do that when you could just stream it to them? It's 2003 now, we can do that.

I don't think anyone was actually doing this in 2003, because the infrastructure just wasn't there. Twitch didn't exist, Justin TV didn't exist. Youtube did not exist. I'm sure some people streamed things to small audiences, but I wasn't out looking for video in 2003 myself. Homestar Runner was doing me just fine.

But, assuming you had the bandwidth and/or hosting, it could be done with basically just consumer hardware. The results aren't even that bad, considering what some livestreams still looked like 5+ years later.

How? Well, basically because Apple really, really wanted streaming video to be a thing, plus a few lesser known tricks that consumer camcorders could pull off. Roll them all together and you've got a surprisingly capable, 20 year old console streaming setup.


plumpan
@plumpan

Videos are once again working in this post. It was very popular, so it should have working videos.

Thanks to @purpleraccoon for CDN hosting :3


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in reply to @plumpan's post:

This is WAY better than having to fight with virtual audio cable. Just hearing that name makes me twitch now.

I genuinely don't think this setup is too complex, but I think that mostly says something about the kind of setups I've been using for the past few years >.>

On question 2; one of the earliest instances of livestreaming I know is StarCraft Brood War! South Korea was doing quite a bit of streaming of it because of how big it was, and there was SOME of that happening stateside as well... But from what little I've seen, it looked REALLY grainy on stateside and you basically had to already play the game to distinguish units.

There's an example I KNOW I've seen that I KNOW was livestreamed in the states but I cannot for the life of me find it and I have been trying for about an hour :( I miss when google was useful. My guess would be before 2005 based on what I can remember.

this is amaaaaaazing. I know back in the day I saw a couple of livestreams hosted on akamai but I can imagine that it was only the sort of thing you pursued if you had an extremely eager IT organization.

THANK

The only organization I know for sure was doing livestreams was Apple with their keynotes, which of course they were pushing all of this tech very hard so of course they were. I'm sure some other companies started copying that not long after but no idea who all actually did.

Oh god, this unlocked a really cursed memory. I definitely pushed LEGO webcam video (which quality-wise looked like that last one in your post) out over dialup from Windows Media Encoder in probably 2003/2004. I think a friend in another state and one down the street watched on separate occasions. I think I went to the closer friends’ house to watch the live feed of like, an empty room?

  • good work!

  • re: early streaming, if you have not watched my video on the sony streaming laptop you might wanna. they had a service called PerCasTV that was an open streaming platform in, i think, 2001? and other early streaming experiments started around then, but it was still pretty rare

  • re: streaming over dialup, it would have been tough but possible. It's very hard to find hard numbers rn and I wish I had the time to go install the software and check, but: Since 56K never achieved total saturation and was not reliable, I am nearly positive that there were streaming videos that proclaimed that they were optimized for 33.6. Prior to 56K, dialup was symmetric, so if you could download at 33.6, you could upload at it too, meaning you could absolutely stream to exactly one other person. It wouldn't look GOOD, but you could do it.

THANK

I have seen that video, in fact! It is very good. I probably could have specified "outside japan" but I was hoping there was some weird, western (or just documented) service that somehow everyone knew about but me. I want to see footage, seeing something that was on PerCasTV would be amazing.

"What video can be streamed over 33.6K and be useful to the person watching on the other end" sounds like a fun encoder experiment. If you're the kind of sicko that wants to play around with encoder settings all day, anyway. I honestly don't know what would actually be visible enough to be ineligible at that bitrate, fun thought experiment perhaps.

i love this. plugging composite into a camcorder and getting dv over firewire out would've been a natural assumption for people used to chaining cable boxes and VCRs together. the camcorder manufacturers had a lot of good reasons to not support this, but they actually met people's natural expectations!

it's refreshing, so often older technology makes promises it only barely keeps. here it's made no promise but what someone might have unthinkingly tried immediately works.

re: powerpc being slow as shit, yes agreed. its amazing people were editing tv shows and real hollywood movies on like, final cut pro 1 and a sawtooth g4. proxy workflows are one thing but the render time must have been measured in days. i have no idea what codecs they were using or if there were DSP cards like old avids because when i ran FCP2 on a dual 1ghz with os9 the only export options were terrible

A lot of the joy I get from old camcorders is that they were obviously built to not be updated in the field. There'd be a new model out in a year or two, sure, but there was a model a year or two before that and they can't just, shove things out the door. Everything is thought out, edge cases considered, and as long as you didn't cheap out you could expect to have a device which will at least try to do anything you could ask of it. Sometimes poorly, in the case of the still imaging capabilities.

I want to do some Real iMovie Editing at some point when I have an excuse to, and I'm exceptionally curious how well it will work on this G4.

I've spent a bit trying to wrap my head around the gravity of this and the amazement that it didn't catch on, despite the quality. I like how one of the screenshots show "0.7" fps for multiple feeds.

This looks amazing though. Can't imagine how stunning it would have been to kids using it back then.

Yeah I really oversold it when I said 10fps lol. I actually did try watching it over 23k-ish dialup back then, once or twice, and it was awful. Half the time you were at 1 fps or whatever AND you didn't get enough of the frame in time so half the image was just undecoded 8x8 blocks of random garbage.

This is a fascinating method to accomplish the task! The method I was familiar with in that time period (late 2003 or so) was, well, much cheaper to set up.

There was an internet acquaintance I had at the time who had some manner of access to a nice symmetrical 100/100 mbps internet access line either at the university he worked for/went to, or possibly just in the outlying student apartments - a real location matters sort of situation. His setup was a fairly recent at the time Pentium 4 desktop, and one of the cheap video-capture/tv tuner cards for it that had been around for a number of years at that point (at any rate much cheaper than a whole camcorder that supported video input and digital output).

His setup used Nullsoft's NSVtools for capturing and live encoding straight from the composite or coaxial inputs, and of course the NSV format for the actual stream, which at that time was using MP3 for the audio and VP3 for video (later, newer codecs were supported as time went on of course). On the client side of things, the main intended target was Winamp 2.9 or newer, and VLC and a few other players picked up support eventually.

With a ~512 kilobit per second stream, you could usually pull off 352x240 or 320x240 at 29.97 fps for straight up quarter-NTSC video transport, or 30 fps for content that wasn't coming from an analog source. Some live action content looked fine down at 256 kilobits a second or less! If you wanted to try to pull off dial-up availability it was capable of going down to about ~40-50 kbps output by quartering the overall resolution again and kicking it down to 15 fps, but honestly I don't think that'd stay stable. Might have been fine for an ISDN line or something!


I had a 8/2 megabit cable line at the time so the bandwidth wasn't a big issue for watching, but I never tried streaming myself. On his end, he'd tried to do some streaming of games he was playing on the same computer used for the streaming software, but that never worked out due to the processing needs of the encoder. So the content was mostly him playing games off his consoles or sometimes off of DVDs and VHS tapes he'd found, or sometimes just streaming off his cable box to watch a movie or sports. Live action video you could usually stand to see full screen on your monitor, animated or video game content you'd usually leave in a window cuz the artifacting could get quite a bit more noticeable. Watched Silent Hill 3 for the first time that way.

The most people online this guy's setup ever seemed to have was around like 80 people, if too many people past that joined the stream would get shaky for everyone. Not sure what the limiting factor really was there. We of course used IRC for chatting about what we're watching and making requests, all that stuff.

The NSVtools (windows only) from the time period are still accessible via web.archive.org on nullsoft's website, as well as some of the NSV sample video files used to demonstrate. Current and vintage versions of Winamp can still work with the files and the streams, and VLC is mostly still able to handle the files and streams.

This is fascinating and I may need to try this. A few questions:

Do you know how your friend actually watched the game that was being played, when he did that? Judging by the rest of the setup I wouldn't be surprised if he just did a home made Y cable to run one set of inputs to the TV, although I guess some capture cards would have had pass through.

Also, if possible, roughly where were you living to get 8/2 cable in 2003? That feels a lil early (hardly impossible, just maybe more on the cutting edge) for decent home cable, particularly the upload. Maybe I'm just biased from having awful DSL in that era.

I kind of want to try this, I think I have an era appropriate capture card, but driver hell may not make it worth the effort.

Thank you for sharing :eggbug-smile-hearts:

Yeah the guy who ran it just used RCA splitters, he was playing the games right on his TV like normal, not relying on pass through from the PC.

At this time I was living in the suburbs of Philly, on the jersey side. Our neighborhood got wired for cable internet by Comcast in 1999 and my parents switched to it then - it was initially 6/1 service in 1999 and went up to 8/2 at some point in between there.

Keep in mind theoretical maximum speeds per modem for cable service in 1999 with DOCSIS 1.1 was 40 megabit down/10 megabit up, and by 2001 when DOCSIS 2.0 came out that increased to a theoretical 40/30. My understanding is that you'd usually only get those speeds on high price business accounts in limited service areas, but hey fractions of it were great then!

We weren't on the highest tier or anything, so I don't know what the maximum speed they even offered would be, but we also weren't on the lowest. Surviving ads and archived websites indicate that they often only offered or only offered prices for services ranging from 1.5m/384k or 3/1 services in a variety of areas - but of course all the detailed ordering/configuration pages are long dead active content. The speeds I give for our home service is what I noted down from way back in the day - with my primary speed test mechanism in 1999/2000 being Napster's UI, lol.

If you'd like some further perspective on how widespread the initial 1999 services by Comcast cable internet were, archive.org has a capture of a spring 1999 guide to areas Comcast served and whether particular ZIP codes had cable internet, had plans for cable internet with a scheduled time, or just plain weren't scheduled yet: https://web.archive.org/web/19991008050845/http://www.comcastonline.com/servicetable.asp

Whew!

Anyway probably your best cards to look for, whether under Win98 or WinXP for the NSVtools, would be one of the "ATI TV Wonder" or "Hauppauge WinTV" PCI cards. They tend to still be pretty plentiful secondhand on eBay and the like, had good software and had good drivers when new & fairly easy to find period-accurate drivers now.

🫡