A collection of vids I got from various support and places in the 1990s. Some from official releases (CD-ROM), universities' FTPs that hosted a lot of them back then, etc.
It's mostly something I did for fun, it's not strictly in release or quality order. Also, I already deleted a lot of files since the 2000s when doing clean-ups so a lot of well-known series are missing.
Around 1994 capturing videos started to be possible on computers (PC/Mac) using expensive hardware cards. The codecs were limited by the CPUs' low power for both packing and realtime unpacking.
Cinepak was a very common codec in the 1990s because it was bundled into the earliest version of QuickTime and could be played on very small CPUs like the Motorola 68030.
Then MPEG1 came in pushed with the VCD format, but it needed time to be able to be read on regular computers and it needed a licence to encode, so pricy commercial software was needed and players weren't available easily. Some intermediate codecs appeared like AVI Indeo. Also, the capture and compression was a hard limit, the first computers in 1994 could only capture a few seconds and could take hours to make it a Cinepak file. That was also the case for MPEG1. The video sources was also not very good, often VHS, more rarely Laserdiscs. Note that VHS were not always as bad I people think nowadays. Most subtitled videos you can see were actually captured from VHS.
IMO the BIG BIG change that was brought by MPEG1 is the MPEG stereo audio! Because the sound is ALWAYS more important than the video. If you got a good audio track and an less-than-average video quality, people forgives it, but not when it's the opposite.
In 1995 the PlayStation was released with video playback capabilities, using it's own hacked MJPEG format. Saturn also would replay Cinepak files.
Around 1998 some high end MPEG hardware cards appeared and also very good software encoders. Broadcasters and production companies also started to use Digital Betacam as a master format.
In 1998 DVD videos started to roll out, the same time capture cards went up to full resolution (480i) and MPEG2 software codecs appeared.
A new player started to spread out: VLC. It was free and could decode a lot of codecs without the need for any license. However a powerful setup was needed. For instance, the VLC website shows that a Pentium II 300Mhz could only decode MPEG2 at 12fps in 1999.
The Please Save my Earth music video was captured in 480i from Laserdisc and packed in MPEG2, but it took me nearly a full day to compress on a powerful Pentium II, and only that computer was able to play it back at the time.
In 1999 the DVD got hacked and you could directly rip the MPEG2 contents. It's worth noting that MPEG2 was really a big step forward to get broadcast quality with a "limited" bandwidth. The DVD discs solved the storage issue (4 or 8GB was huge at the time).
In 1999, DivX was also released, which was a hack of an early MPEG4 codec. It wasn't as good as MPEG1 quality wise but could get good quality with half the filesize. It was used with the recent MPEG Layer-III audio implentation, also known as MP3.
A lot of people started to be able to read and swap videos but they wanted full episodes or movies, and that's why codecs that could use very low bitrate with free players like RealVideo started to be massively used.
So in the early 2000s, the quality went initially down, until internet connection got faster, DivX got better and was replaced by Xvid and eventually mint MP4 codecs.
