NAID 1995 and 1995 Video Clip Notes

In this directory, you'll find digital video captures of three different
NAID tapes.  These tapes were not compiled by us; they were gracefully
donated by MEd (Eric Lagace) and Stephan Whittam (Inspired Chaos).

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These video clips were encoded as MPEG system streams.  MPEG was
chosen because of its universal cross-platform standard format, and its
sophisticated high levels of compression.

If you disagree with the decision to go with MPEG, and think that
the clips should've been distributed in another medium, email me at
trixter@oldskool.org so we can discuss it.

DOS:  There aren't many full (IPB-frame) MPEG players available, but
Display 1.8x or 1.9x can play them okay without sound; you'll need a 386
or higher to run Display.  You can also try the old version of VMPEG;
you should probably be able to find it at http://www.mpeg.org/MSSG/#dos.

There is an old version of Xing's DOS MPEG player floating around
(MPEG.EXE, I believe; it's been a long time), but it only decodes
non-standard I-frame-only video streams, so you'll get garbage if you
try to use it.

Windows 3.1:  Try the Xing MPEG player at www.xingtech.com.  VMPEG
(http://www.mpeg.org/MSSG/#vmpeg) also runs under Windows 3.1.

Windows 95:  Make sure you have the latest Media Player from Microsoft;
it contains a surprisingly good (for Microsoft, anyway) MPEG player.
As of this writing, you can get the latest Media Player at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mediaplayer/

Windows 98:  You should already have an MPEG player installed; just
double-click on the filename.  If you don't, or are experiencing problems,
refer to the Windows 95 note above.

Macintosh:  I don't own a Mac, but people tell me that MacZilla
(maczilla.com) works well for playing MPEG files.  If you have a Powermac,
Quicktime has an MPEG plugin (quicktime.apple.com).

Unix:  The best MPEG player for Unix right now is MpegTV (www.mpegtv.com).
It supports a ton of Unix variants, including Linux (x86 libc5, x86 glibc,
PowerPC / MkLinux, Alpha), Solaris SPARC and x86, HP-UX, IRIX, FreeBSD,
BSD/OS, and even SCO OpenServer; and probably more by the time you get
this CD.

(Also, Sun has written a streaming MPEG player for Solaris; I'm unsure
of the exact name, but it has "TV" in the name somewhere.)

Amiga:  Try aMiPEG (http://amiga.com.pl/amipeg/).  Requires at least an
'040 for decent performance.  Supports HAM.

Atari-ST:  Try 1stGuide (http://www.esc.de/homes/guivol/1stguide/).  Talk
about a scene that won't die gracefully:  "1stGuide is a program/accessory
to view/play the following standard file formats in GEM windows on all
Atari machines, all system configurations, in all screen resolutions and
color depths (1 Bit Monochrome up to 32 Bit TrueColor)."  Oldskooler!
Yeah!

OS/2, SGI, and other operaing systems:  Try
poking around www.mpeg.org; specifically, here:
http://www.mpeg.org/~tristan/MPEG/MPEG-video-player.html.  I would imagine
that SGI systems already have an MPEG player installed, but I've never
had the priviledge to work with one.

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Technical/Geek Notes:  With the exception of the naid96_2/montage.mpg
file, all of these captures are low bitrate captures.  My hardware MPEG
device can only go as "low" as 100k/sec, so I had to recompress them
down even further by compressing the P frames even more, and simulating
a framerate of 15fps during extremely noisy frames by encoding a "blank"
(non-changing) frame every other frame.  On the mid-bitrate clips in the
naid96_2 directory, you can see this in high-motion clips: The framerate
is usually 29.97 fps (NTSC standard), but drops down to 15fps when there's
too much change between frames, and then speeds back up when the action
slows down.

MPEG is *way* cool.  I love MPEG.

-- Trixter / Hornet (Jim Leonard; trixter@oldskool.org)