ODDWARE: ReelMagic - The 1995 Full Motion Video Experience 

Encarta was the best thing 🙏

Encarta was my go-to source for book reports lol

Remember they had a really cool video on Soundgarden?

I just want this story to be told.... my daughter is in her 20s now. She is so used to modern electronics, she once stepped outside with her friends and straight out said" Oh wow, the clouds look sooooooo 3D". The complete opposite of how I reacted to the video on a computer. Thanks for your time 🙏. I just thought that was funny. Maybe it's just me.

I had totally forgotten Encarta. Had '95 lol

I could be wrong, but wasn't there both an AVI and MPEG version of those videos? the MPEG one had better video quality, but the AVI had better sound. I'm not sure if this was from the Windows CD or maybe one of those ATI Mach 64 cards that came out with MPEG chip.

Nostalgia Nerd also mentioned this video in his Windows 95 Weezer episode. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FOl94fO78nk.html

Oh i dunno about the games the glut of FMV games made me wanna puke.

I remember being so disappointed in my mega CD - Sonic CD was amazing, but everything else I had was terrible and focused on the FMV instead of gameplay

@@nuttyjawa Ya companies ran with that FMV on the Sega CD i swear if Sega didnt allow that glut of FMV they might still be making consoles today. Well that and if they didnt release 32x

@@legbert123 what’s hilarious to me is for as much as gamers now make fun of fmv, you spend more time with your controller on the couch watching cutscenes in modern games than you did with the likes of sewer shark which successfully blended fmv with the gameplay. The number of QT events in games now too make Dragon’s Lair blush. I don’t need a constant pop up telling me to push triangle to toss a guy through a window. The Call of Duty franchise is a glorified movie with the same endless scripted events.

@@mikeg2491 Who is this you. I dont tend to play games with much QT and I know nothing of The call of Duty series. I like a lil narrative to punctuate 85% of the gameplay loop. I do know that I was so pissed off when I bought my $400 Sega Cd in the day with 3 games, SS and Night Trap were the first 2 I played. SS Did not successfully blend fmv with the gameplay. The FMW was horrible and The cursor was hella laggy. Oh well Night trap was worth the laughs I guess, and Eternal Champions Cd was was meh but not total shit. Fuck the Sega CD

The Hollywood Plus you mean? I had as part of a Sony DVD ROM kit which included Jumanji on DVD. I later bought the remote control add-on (IR receiver connected to a serial port) as well. And an OEM version of the same card shipped with Creative Labs' DVD playback kit.

@@NumptyMcNumptyface Yes, that's the one (I think)! It was pretty cool being able to watch DVD on the PC =D A year or two later you didn't need that card lol.

I was given a Diamond Multimedia MPEG2 decoder + 1x DVD-ROM kit new in the box around 1999. The PCI card was a truly full length beast, like 1984 PC full length. Diamond introduced the kit in 1997 and promptly tried to ignore it ever existed thanks to the new Pentium III's demonstrated ability to not need a hardware MPEG2 decoder. The decoder only worked with the included DVD player software, which was utter crap. It had no ability to maximize its window or go full screen. It could be manually resized, showing off the hardware's ability to resize the video. Why no other software could use it was because for some crazy reason Diamond decided to completely ignore DirectX, which could have been used to easily enable any other video software to use the card. Even worse, the drivers and player would only work properly in original Windows 95. Even installing the 95a update would break it! There never was any software update, just a download of exactly what came on the CD-ROM. What it looked like was Diamond had started work on the thing just as soon as they got wind of DVD-ROM drives going to become available for PCs, and chose to operate completely disconnected from everything "on the outside", including updates to Windows. Then when 1997 rolled around and the new generation of CPUs obliterated the need for all their work, they shipped the crap they had in stock and washed their hands of the product. Dunno why they wouldn't have gone back to the coding dungeon to do DirectX drivers, they could have re-positioned it as an upgrade for older PCs without the sheer CPU grunt to software decode DVD MPEG2. MPEG2 decoder cards from other companies did live on for a while with exactly that kind of marketing, and even for systems that could software decode DVD but only if that's the only thing they were doing. An MPEG2 card could enable a PC to play DVD in the foreground while you had it doing some other CPU intensive task in the background, like compressing a ripped DVD video to MPEG1 for burning a Super Video CD. Really shouldn't need to mention that the other MPEG2 card sellers provided DirectX compatible drivers, and they worked with newer versions of Windows.

These are gems today even, apparently a rare version of under a killing moon exists that uses the card

I had the special mpeg version that had 4x larger vid clips

Microcosm was identical without the FMV module right?

Shit... I had an inverter running to an old PC with a stripped down Windows `95 install in the trunk of my '86 Taurus playing these songs recorded in the new Franhoeffer Music Codec (MP3) from my 1GB Seagate drive and a 10Mbit NE2000 ethernet card cabled to an NEC laptop remoted in to the PC using WinMirror playing 1000s of songs using Sonique and an ISA SB-16. I should have patented the first iPod.

Success! not sure why but the mt-32 emulation is working now with midiconfig=1 in .conf. And in the RTZ setup, changing audio devices to Soundblaster 16 for sound effects and mt-32 for music. Excellent! I'm REALLY excited now for a whole new RTZ experience! Thank you for making the video!

I have one of those boxed w all the extra software and booklets I did a video on it

Sounds to me like the BBC Doomsday project?

@@mrtiff99 Yes that was it! Core memories.

@@dine9093 Yep, I was also blown away by it. I remember thinking it would be amazing to have something like that in the home some day, now i carry it around on device that fits in my pocket, mad!

I actually found that game was pretty good, more paths to lose or win than I expected, I did a full playthrough of it

I also had a Packard Bell PC from the same time. The Weezer music video was included on the Windows 95 CD-ROM and did certainly did not consume 2GB of space. In fact there were also other videos like a movie trailer, Edie Brickell music video, and a few Win95 promos.

I had an original Hauppage WintV PCI I used to hook up a camcorder and video chat on CUSeeMe and Netmeeting at 5FPS over dialup. It was the future, man.

500? That's a lot. I was using Celeron 333 MHz.

Some of the original developers of hardware decoding were Visual Circuits and MediaSonic. Maybe start there. Wouldn't be surprised if chips were related as SB did not develop their own chips at the time. There were 3 or 4 proprietary CD drive standards before ATAPI/IDE and Creative Labs had their "own" which I seem to recall being a Philips/JVC protocol with a different pinout but the same connector that could be defeated with a specially crimped cable but don't quote me on that.

I don’t remember the zen garden what was this from

Phantasmagoria didn’t make use of the features of reelmagic, but the psychotron (not mentioned in this video) does, I did a full play through of the special reelmagic edition of it There’s also a rare version of Dune the dos game with reelmagic fmv

Crime patrol series is great I wish a unreal engine 5 version existed they can nowadays mix fmv w 3d

Those are gems I also suggest quantum gate