Comment by MisterTea

I looked into this a bit a while ago, what Sloot did was at least a bit novel. Basically the way his encoding scheme actually worked was that it would store each line of video into a database, encode each video frame as a series of line lookups, and then store that encoded frame into another database. Then each video is a series of frame lookups. When you hear accounts of him being able to demo smooth playback of 16 videos at once on late 90s hardware, this is how he did it. Because each frame is a series of line lookups, splitting the screen horizontally 16 times and playing 16 videos at once is not any more taxing than playing a single video fullscreen. Similarly, he was able to fast-forward and rewind smoothly because each frame is individually decoded, it's not like traditional video compression where you have to calculate differences from each keyframe. Playing at 2x speed was not any more taxing than 1x speed. Of course he never would have been able to store a video file in 8KB or whatever, but this meant that (for example) if you had a whole season of a TV show in your database, the opening and ending credits would only be stored once.

> The SDCS is only possible if keys are allowed to become infinite, or the data store is allowed to become infinite (...) This would, of course, make the idea useless.

But Pi is infinite. And thus this genius contraption will work as long as we have Moore's law on our side :)

I have very fond memories of reading that book.

Never heard of that one, that's amazing! Love it.