Comment by Karliss
7 hours ago
Not going to say anything about AI translations. But the video recording don't do justice for many of demos.
The effects in some of the demos simply kill any video encoder, only way to properly experience them is by running or emulating locally. Not that crystal sharp upscaled square pixels on modern display or poor quality CRT filters are very representative either, but it's likely better than blurry mess you get when video encoder tries to deal with high frequency details or random noise from procedural effects.
I’m sure there are lossless recordings around. At 320x200x8bit even a simple sequence of PNGs wouldn’t take that much space in today’s terms.
Just did a quick test 320x200x8bit grayscale PNG (couldn't quickly figure out how to get 8bit color pallet) compressed to ~15-40kB. Multiply that by 60frames a second (or whatever odd framerate historic hardware used) and 120seconds and you get 200MB. Not completely impractical, but I wouldn't call it trivial amount of space. And if you find any demoscene collection providing losslessly compressed videos let me know. All I have seen is original executable+youtube video (which suffers from compression artifacts). And I doubt many demoscene website maintainers are eager to increase their storage and bandwidth costs 100x.
Fair, it’s indeed a shame if there aren’t lossless or very-high-bitrate lossy recordings available. A literal sequence of PNGs is of course an upper limit, using temporal coherence (of which there’s a lot of) would shrink the size to maybe a few tens of megabytes. But of course there aren’t many lossless video formats in common use because it’s a rather niche use case outside mastering and archival. There’s lossless H.264 and H.265, and IETF’s FFV seems pretty well-supported too. Not sure if browsers support them though.