Want to ask you this because you really have been here and on the web for an extremely long time:
How was RealPlayer for you? It was one of the ways people could have shared videos online back in those times....... compared to putting a whole video file on a web page nowadays which I'm so happy that we can even do now! But we all didn't have the speeds we have now in those times, so people had to stream them....... -
- through a freeware program........ I've been thinking of making part of my 'site or a seperate one that uses a table layout and older things for fun, I was thinking of putting Real Media files on there. Definitely wouldn't use 'em on my main 'site and *mainly* use RealPlayer.... no. Been wondering what people's experiences were with it long ago and thought: why not ask you?
In those times, due to where I lived, internet was slow and expensive. Another factor was that I was poor, and computers were expensive back then, which meant all I had was a knock-off Pentium II clone that could barely play a GIF file. Mid-1998 the internet speed was 33,6kpbs here, so video sharing was deemed basically a non-starter.
Early in 2000 I was finishing my work-back period at the state owned telco. I used that last opportunity before I left, to download the Sonic OVA, it took an excruciating 14 hours overnight to pull down a 266Mbyte 640x480 video compressed with MPEG-4, and when I got it my computer didn't have the grunt to play it. During 2003-2004 we got our anime, movies everything from LANs and/or anime screening weekends
In 2005 broadband internet arrived, albeit <1MBps... and with ridiculous data caps of 3GBytes. But there were ways and means to bypass it, and that we did... And then came YouTube.. 2008 was when I got into it really
And now we have 400/400Mbps optical fiber into my home... but I don't take it for granted because I remember the times when my lousy, slow, internet connection COST MORE than this state-of-the-art
@sonic2k Thank you so much for telling me about this! I've always heard and known about clones of electronics but I haven't even heard of clones of CPUs before? I guess you could only load web pages with text & images to a point..... and there was the option to disable images and scripts built into browsers or separate extensions
I bet that felt really good to be able to download the whole Sonic OVA at your workplace at the time, or if I'm misconceptioning; they provided you internet at home. But sad that you didn't have enough computer power to play it :( Anyone can overlook at how MPEG-4 can run fine and play on any computer nowadays, but codecs are powerful, complicated things
Were the data caps from the ISP? Wondering how that worked..... that's great you were able to get past it And nowadays with fiber internet, we people get frustrated and spoiled when we're downloading from a slow server!