A Redditor is squeezing entire movies onto a single floppy disk - Engadget

Shrek on a floppy disk — Reddit/GreedyPaint

Sure, you can have an 8K TV displaying incredible visuals and a top-of-the-line sound system pumping out crystal-clear 22.2 channel audio. But why bother when you can fit an entire movie onto a floppy disk and use a custom VCR to play it?

A Redditor named u/GreedyPaint is doing just that. They wrote a custom x265 video codec that compresses video to a resolution of 120 x 96 pixels at a silky smooth four frames per second. As such, they were able to cram Shrek onto a medium with a storage size of 1.44 MB, or around 0.03 percent of a DVD's 4.7 GB capacity. In fact, u/GreedyPaint pulverized Shrek down to 1.37 MB, so there was room to spare.

To play that ultra-janky version of the movie, u/GreedyPaint hooked up a floppy disk drive to a Raspberry Pi as part of a custom VCR system they call the LimaTek Diskmaster. When the device powers up, it displays a homemade animation which asks the Redditor to insert a disk. When they do, the movie plays automatically.

You can check out a video of u/GreedyPaint’s contraption in action on Reddit. Given the immense compression at work, the sound and audio quality takes a major hit. Some might argue that it’s the best Smash Mouth’s “All Star” has ever sounded, however.

This version of Shrek looks even worse than it did on the Game Boy Advance Video version, even though that had a resolution of 112p. Meanwhile, for their next trick, u/GreedyPaint is looking into ways of stuffing a movie onto another vintage medium: a vinyl record.

In this article: raspberry pi, floppy disk, vcr, shrek, reddit, movie, entertainment, gear

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