Many years ago, "8088 Domination" demonstrated full motion video on the original 1981 IBM personal computer:

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post...

As it turns out, the video was encoded in such a way that it could be played back using the display bandwidth of the original PC, BUT doing that encoding required a modern computer to perform in a reasonable amount of time.

Tangential to the tangent, but turbo codes/LDPC are algorithms for transmitting data over unreliable links with optimal redundancy for a target error rate. They underlie much of modern wireless data transfer, and were known to be possible since Shannon, but nobody had figured out how to actually do it in practise. When they were invented in the '90s everybody reacted with disbelief at first!

> Granted, I'm not sure there existed a computer in the 90s that was powerful enough to encode or decode it.

In software, quite possibly not[0].

But I'm sure we could have built hardware decoders that were up to decoding AV1 or HEVC back in the 90s no problem, had those codecs existed at the time.

[0] Somewhat later than the timeframe we're talking about, but I remember with pain the moment I realised my 600MHz Athlon, with 256MB RAM and 32MB GeForce 256 video card, was thoroughly obsolete because it couldn't decode and play the original Half Life 2 preview without stuttering, screen tearing and, indeed, crashing.

I'm having trouble finding it but there was an article a while back comparing mp3 speed gains from hardware and software. The hardware was getting better at the pace of Moore's law but the (de)compression speeds for mp3s were far outpacing it, showing that mp3 decoding optimizations were giving orders of magnitude more speedup.

I think this is a common trend for algorithms that are in wide use, where you have Moore's law like behavior on the hardware side and then also software optimizations that give their own order of magnitude speedups.

We had video conferencing on a single BRI (128k) with g728 and h264. It was CIF resolution so yes it is possible. And with that loss free ISDN connection the experience wasn't actually that bad. Though this was in the early 2010s where there was still a surprisingly large amount of ISDN around

I wonder where you'd hit the performance limits vs the algorithmic improvements. On our family pentium 120 playing an mp3 in Winamp took 10-15% of the CPU, so I'm not sure how much headroom there'd be.

But anecdotally I'll share that one of my brother's college roomies was a consultant for RealVideo and was behind their initial codecs. He came back to them with algorithmic improvements a bit later and they just cold shouldered him saying the existing codec was good enough.

So who knows if the biz side folks at the time would have even seen value in better codecs, as unbelievable as that seems to us now in the streaming and zoom call world.

I've seen this in reality - compare the sound of an XM radio from 2003 to a modern one, same codec, same symbol rate, better audio quality. The same is true on digital two way radio (DMR, P25, TETRA, etc) the quality has improved because we can make the codecs do more intensive work, because the hardware is faster.

h264 was used in a homebrew port of Dragons Lair for the Nintendo 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i89f_CMn7bw

You can technically have some then-contemporary FMV titles run on N64 with a 64MB cart. The hardware lends itself to it because it has the RSP, a secondary MIPS processor with re-programmable microcode. But the best video compression we had at the time was MPEG-2, which just wouldn't cut it.

Wouldn’t you still need the CPU horsepower to decode it?

Bill Joy once said in an interview that if you look at scientific computing it wasn't just hardware that advanced at a consistent rate, software also consistently made large speed gains over time.