[Coco] CoCo Video Player Project

[Nick Marentes]

 > I'm not sure if that example pertains to the idea being discussed.
 > What do you mean by "streaming (from RAM)" ? Looping through a small
 > number of images already in RAM is not the same as reading continuous
 > video data from a storage device.

 > Darren


No, it's not exactly but close. RAM based limits the number of 
uncompressed frames that can be stored. Pulling from an external storage 
decice will allow a larger  play length. This was demonstrated by 
someone (forgot his name) I believe at a Cocofest in 1998 with an IDE 
internal drive.

The real challenge is the decoding of a compressed video format fast 
enough on a CoCo3 to have a reasonable frame rate. That Timex Sinclair 
demo seems to be doing that...but would anyone really want to watch a 
black and white blocky (text block based) video??

Sock Master's demo showed what can be achieved using 64K uncompressed 
hi-color frames. I guess the challenge is writing an M/L decoder for 
AVI, mpeg or some  format which would be possible for the 2Mhz CoCo to 
decompress and play back at a decent frame rate (15fps?) with a 
reasonable color depth (16? Maybe good for animations and cartoons?). I 
believe it is possible but in an age where we all take for granted the 
ability to play 30fps, high color videos on our phones, how many of us 
"old timers" are there that will be impressed for long?

It's the decompression that is the biggest challenge, the streaming is 
not so bad with a fast storage device (Maybe an SD card interface?)

Anyone want to design a high speed CoCo3 co-processor card?  Or 
interface an mpeg decoder chip?   :)

Nick

(P.S. "Old Timers" should be interpreted as "those of us with wisdom 
from the dawn of home computing")     :)