Redditor compresses 'Shrek' film onto a 1.44 MB floppy disk
In a stark departure from 8K televisions and high fidelity Blu-ray media playback, a Redditor has gone full retro by cramming the entire Shrek film onto a floppy. At a filesize of 1.37 MB, the film plays back at a resolution of 120x96 pixels and four frames a second. That's 0.003 percent of the total capacity of a dual-layer Blu-ray disc.
LimaTek Diskmaster: Unlikely union of Raspberry Pi and floppy drive
Reddit user GreedyPaint made a retro-themed playback device dubbed LimaTek Diskmaster for playing back the unusual media format. It consists of a Raspberry Pi inside a custom case that's hooked up to a floppy disk drive. The ingenious Redditor wrote a custom x265 video codec to compress the film exponentially. He is presently busy compressing the movie onto another retro format: a vinyl record.
A love letter to '80s VHS revolution
The retro-stylized video depicting the operation of GreedyPaint's contraption depicts a decidedly '80s looking VCR-esque device fashioned out of a Raspberry Pi. The CRT display comes alive bearing an old-timey logo of the made-up LimaTek Diskmaster, followed by a prompt to insert a floppy. The entire mock retro video captures the '80s aesthetic down to the VHS tracking artifacts and noisy, film grain-addled visuals.
What is the x265 video codec?
The free and open-source x265 video encoding library works with the rather self-explanatory High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compression format. It allows video streams to be encoded into the H.265/MPEG-H HEVC formats. The codec is considered the gold standard in video encoding.
Raspberry Pi: Computing for the masses
For the unversed, Raspberry Pi is the single-board computer line-up made by a UK-based charity to develop a greater interest in computer science among the masses. There have been four primary generations of Raspberry Pi so far, with the Pi 4 being the latest. Individuals use the SBCs to learn programming skills, build hardware projects, home automation, and even deploy them in industrial applications.
