alt Hacker NewsThese were big in the late 90s going into the early 00s. And there were also SVCDs which were MPEG2 video insead of MPEG1. There were a few brands of DVD players that supported them, APEX was the 90s one form China and then Phillips had some models that played lots of formats including avi files. The avi files often used a testing mpg4 video codec in the microsoft video player that got extracted and became the standard and grew into Divx and later Xvid.
Oh yes. I stepped through most of those, including the region-hackable Apex and a plays-anything Phillips.
Previous to that, I was doing some process or other on the PC that converted VCDs into a format that could be played on a modded PSX. The quality was terrible and I did it anyway.
When DVD was still a very new and expensive-to-use format, I scored a very cheap SCSI DVD-ROM drive that was a pull from some Sun machine or other. I never did succeed at playing a glitch-free film with it.
Part of that disappointment was due the 3dfx Voodoo 3 card lacking the MPEG 2 decoder that it had, at one point, been advertised to feature. In its place was a mail-in coupon that could be sent in for a software decoder...which never showed up, either.
It was an interesting time in digital video.