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I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later. I could hold shift and drag on the timel

I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later. I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.

j1elo 10mo ago
You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques. There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope. [1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
- Tabular-Iceberg 10mo ago
  Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe. What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
- CharlesW 10mo ago
  > Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes. > There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode… Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
  - kalleboo 10mo ago
    It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
    - darkwater 10mo ago
      > It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
    - morshu9001 10mo ago
      QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.
mmh0000 10mo ago
What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux. Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills. And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past. Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file. The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
- ConceptJunkie 10mo ago
  Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free. But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > But I'll always miss VirtualDub. Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
    - paradox460 10mo ago
      ffmpeg?
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        Not sure you missed it, I did say "easy" :) Last time I compared them, VirtualDub was still the fastest.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 10mo ago
    But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker. This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
dspillett 10mo ago
> RealPlayer was a dumpster fire And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.

j1elo 10mo ago

You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques. There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope. [1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Tabular-Iceberg 10mo ago
Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe. What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
CharlesW 10mo ago
> Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes. > There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode… Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
- kalleboo 10mo ago
  It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
  - darkwater 10mo ago
    > It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
  - morshu9001 10mo ago
    QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.

mmh0000 10mo ago

What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux. Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills. And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past. Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file. The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.

ConceptJunkie 10mo ago
Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free. But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > But I'll always miss VirtualDub. Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
  - paradox460 10mo ago
    ffmpeg?
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      Not sure you missed it, I did say "easy" :) Last time I compared them, VirtualDub was still the fastest.
- Tabular-Iceberg 10mo ago
  But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker. This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.

dspillett 10mo ago

> RealPlayer was a dumpster fire And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.