A fried alerted me to this video where you referenced my website where you got all the software versions from. Great to see this was still handy since my website will soon be disappearing after my retirement in February where my site is hosted. As I mentioned on my website, I was sent a prototype S-video attachment that plugs into the side slot, sent to me by an ex-Play employee. I used some of the info we exchanged in emails on my Snappy website.
I'm wondering if that S-video addon can be reverse engineered to make clones of. Sure it would probably only be for curiosity on how it could have worked, but could still be useful.
Since you know in advance the site will disappear at its current, work URL (understandable), you might consider manually checking if the Wayback Machine has captured all of it, maybe even manually archive any pages or files missing from the archive. If you have another, non-work webspace and are happy to keep hosting the content there yourself post-retirement (or know someone else who is), consider editing the site now, so the page points to or even redirects to the new URL, and then making sure that change is captured by the Wayback Machine too (assuming your employer is okay with that).
I used one of these in the late 90s to create a "virtual window" for my cubicle-bound co-workers. A headless 486 PC running Snappy with an old camcorder took a picture every minute and copied it to the file server, while a Visual Basic app running on individual desktops would copy it down and set the windows background to the image. People stuck in the middle of the building could "look out the window" to see what the weather was like... Great video! I definitely remember Snappy... I think one of the software "updates" came with a new battery cover. Sorry to hear of the sad ending to the company.
I've thought about something kinda similar. Many people live, and work, in windowless environments. Screens are thin enough you could easily put one in a fake window frame and mount it to a wall. Put speakers in the frame and have the volume controlled by the opening and closing of the window. Using this you could then create a window to any location, real or otherwise.
@@CaliMeatWagon A couple of people on RU-vid have done that. But like the... hot anime babe... says, I can imagine it just driving you nuts. If you did it with a big window, you'd notice that as you walked past it, looked at it from different angles, the view was still the same, flat. With a window, you can look in different directions and see different things. It'd work as a small "window", or a larger one at a distance. Maybe for your nuclear shelter or something. Put some sky above your artificial beach. It'd just need to be far away enough that the view would be limited, were it a real window. The further you are from a real window, the less your viewing it from different angles affects the view. But yeah, people get fatigue looking at screens. Great big ones the size of a wall would annoy the piss out of you. It's like they're slightly burning your eyes or your brain or something. There are health and safety regulations telling computer operators to take a break every 15 minutes and look out of a window, or something distant, just to re-focus your eyes and give them some exercise. Otherwise you end up short-sighted. It's possible to do great big walls using displays that specially have very thin borders. I bet you could get screens with almost no border to fit together, there's no reason an LCD or OLED needs a border at the edge. Often that's where the electronics connect to the panel, along the edges, but that only needs like a millimeter. And with chip-on-glass, you can have, well, a chip, in the LCD's glass, to generate the picture and communicate with it's control computer through connections somewhere else. But still, I think it would just look horrible. People now have TV screens in their living rooms that are far too big, too large for the distance you're viewing them from, IE how far your couch is from the wall with the TV on it. You can't comfortably see the whole screen any more. People are dazzled by them so they buy them, but they're not a great idea. Also windowless environments are terrible! Architects should be made to answer for their crimes! People need real windows with views and sunlight. Otherwise it's like being in a cross between a casino and a tin can, no idea where you are, no sense of space or time. Uprooted, disorientated. Nightmarish. Money-grubbing bastards! Can you imagine working on the 70th floor of a skyscraper, and the view out all the windows is other skyscrapers? Madness! No wonder those windows don't open, it'd be raining stockbrokers.
Back when the Snappy came out, our school produced student IDs by using a Panasonic S-VHS camcorder's freeze function to take the "photos", which were then captured by the Snappy and touched up for printing. They did it this way as a cost saving measure, as you could fit many hundreds of student photos on a single S-VHS tape.
The 1990's were the golden age of PC peripherals. A lot of them over-promised and some were downright wacky. Now they've all been replaced by phone apps. One of the thrift stores I used to visit was a graveyard for all this stuff and ancient boxed software. Great video! I was hoping they're be one released over the holidays.
I remember going to the mall to a shareware store, buying a few 3.5" floppy disks on the cheap. If you liked it you could pay the creator for the full version. Don't like apps, it is evaporware. You don't have access to the software if it disappears off of the server, or the if your operating system is updated it no longer works. Yet, you paid for it......
Definitely this is the proof that limitations often improve creativity and imagination. It also has the option of letting you choose the frame that you look better from all of them.
@TubeTimeUS on twitter did a Snappy deep dive, teardown and reverse engineering down to schematic and figuring out remarked "PLAY HD-1500" main chip is a XC2064 FPGA. 30msps ADC + special 2Mbit video ram capable of holding whole field = this thing grabs whole one field of video all at once after perfectly synchronizing to 14.318MHz video clock (like Amiga and VideoToaster). Design is as good as one could get capturing analog video. LPT is the limitation, if the company didnt fold they could easily release same hardware with USB 2.0 frontend in 2000 doing full resolution full framerate live video.
Someone needs to take one of these and hack it to connect using USB to see how fast the old capture chip can be pushed. If it can hit 30 FPS NTSC or 25 FPS PAL and ignore Macrovision, that would be pretty nice.
I worked at Play and it was great to see this blast from the past. I didn't work in the Snappy department, I worked in the Trinity side of the business but I loved going back to Snappy tech support and hanging out with the techs. Humorously one of those techs ended up owning the whole company and I still sell their paintbox software today as a telestrator.
I was a big fan of Play, Inc. back in the late 90s, and got to visit the company in Rancho Cordova, CA in the year 2000. (Where I met Kiki and many other talented people.) Play Inc was actually founded by people who left NewTek, creators of the Video Toaster. Fun fact, you can find a cameo of Kiki in the pilot episode of Babylon 5, because the special effects of the show were made using Amiga 4000's with Video Toaster boards. Play went on to create the Trinity NLE tv studio in a box which was at the forefront of online video streaming, long before RU-vid was ever a thing. (Before their demise that is.)
B5 is an underrated scifi show. Walter Koenig is fantastic as Bester. I wish they had devoted a season to the war with the teeps. I wish Crusade got more than one season.
@@alexanderchernyavskiy5011 Yep! I did! And I was frequent enough viewer on her Play TV “Kiki at Midnight” online show that she had a “Starius Says” graphic made up for when I would ICQ in to comment. 😅 I must confess, I miss those days.
I vaguely remember my uncle using the Snappy since he was a camcorder geek to get family pictures and such. It was definitely impressive for the time. I love how it's just plug, install software and play. For mid 90s hardware as you've mentioned that's actually very amazing. It's sorta rare even now to have technology advertised on a consumer level then for it to completely meet the claims. So sad about the CEO. I suspect they could have gone and made some quality USB capture devices in the 00s and 2010s compared to mediocre stuff we have now. I hope Kiki Stockhammer is doing well! Pretty sure I saw her a few times on TechTV in the late 90s. Her social media doesn't seem active :(
Yes, Kiki is still doing fine -- she gave a speech at the Amiwest Amiga show in October 2022: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6iIGXVnPMPE.html
This is really interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what video game magazines from the 90s used to get a lot of the screenshots they featured.
I was working at Best Buy right when these came out. Store management was super excited about it. That fall, I enrolled in journalism school and they were excited about it too, but more for what they thought the followup might be. I wrote a paper for my New Media class on video capture with a Snappy, more as a proof of concept than anything. Video at 28.8 wasn't practical, but I speculated by the time PCs were fast enough to make video capture practical, Internet speeds might not be far behind so things could line up in a way for it to be a viable delivery mechanism for video. Snappy was a trailblazer, and it showed the way to the future we theorized was possible in 1995. I agree it's a shame it's so forgotten today.
I used these at a former employer in the mid 1990's. We hooked them up to the 1970's vintage video cameras on some older microscopes and replaced the antique CCTV monitors with a Gateway Pentium 100 machine, very similar looking to yours. We were able to grab snapshots of failed components and test results and then mail them directly to the engineers upstairs. Some of them were still in use when I left the company in 2016, albeit with much later Dell machines.
I loved my Snappy. I had hours of fun and digitized hundreds of stills from VHS video tape. I have a directory in my archives called Snappy Pics. The product worked perfectly and to this day I have a soft spot in my heart for the Snappy. Thanks for doing this video... great job documenting the Snappy.
I bought the Snappy around 96 or 97, and really liked it. I also got a parallel port switch box with 4 ports to go with it and was able to plug in the Snappy the printer and my scanner and then i could easily switch between them. I would use my camcorder and TV/VCR to grab stills all the time. All that stuff was so new to me and was so much fun.
I remember helping a friend of my dad set up that exact same computer including a 10base2 lantastic card. The lady that was to use it was such a “pro” at word perfect macros she looked at the mouse and said what’s this! And threw it behind the pc!
Thanks for the travel to memory lane 🙂. I never owned a snappy but I was at the CEBIT in Germany (biggest hardware and software exhibition in Europe) in '96 with my father in my early teens. I even got a pin button that I wore on my jacked for a long time. Haven't thought about this in years...
I used a smiliar thing once to make a small printed guide for secrets and collectibes in PS1 and PS2 games, which i shared with friends at school or sold them for a little bit. The device i had was called Hauppauge and it could make still frames in high resolution and record MPEG1 video. But it was an add-in card, but they also had a version for USB in 2000, as far as i remember
I still have this from new in the 1990s... and the box and manual !! The lack of parallel ports on laptop computers I have used since the desktop 486 has made it a shelf item. I should check that I didn't leave a 9V battery in it, which would have destroyed it if the battery leaked out. Sad about Mr. Montgomery gone at only 39.
I just looked at mine. Nice they include a small hole under the blue _Snappy_ battery cover to allow for a 9V battery eliminator cable to exit with the cover still on. The 107 page manual is high quality and comprehensive. I was very pleased with the results from this; especially with the limitations of the video cards of computers t the time. The results looked amazing for the era.
I loved my Snappy. I used it to grab shots from movies and used them in band flyers and mid-90s era fansites. Thanks for the quarter-century-old computer memories!
Haven't heard of this thing before. This is a really innovative product that's way ahead of it's time. Mostly limited by LPT bus, this would have worked much better with USB. But then again, USB wasn't even invented when this was released.
Once USB got big, this device kinda became obsolete... it was a niche device for a kinda niche market. It was during a time when not everyone had a PC nor everyone thought of sending photos or using them on the PC. PCs were used mostly for documents or surfing the web or playing web games... and once adding photos to the PC became mainstream, this was already an obsolete device because USB allowed you to just transfer over photos...
Snappy, I ever used this mainly to take picture from my VHS cam. TO Solve the issue of space on printer port, i plugged my Snappy to an paralal port extesion pin to pin. cable.
I never used this technology back in the day. But looks pretty cool and works as advertised given the tech limits mid 90's. Good video and very detailed walk through.
12:07 The video recorder in the background there is of the failed Panasonic MII format. It looks like the AG-750 which I am sitting right next to now. The MII format (derived from VHS) was Panasonic's answer to Sony BetacamSP (derived from domestic Betamax) but it failed to really get much traction because all TV studios were using BetacamSP. So in this regard, Beta won and VHS lost, and considering how expensive these machines are, it's likely that Sony made more money from Beta than anyone ever did from VHS. Some smaller videography businesses, of the type that this card seems to show, bought into MII because it was cheaper than BetacamSP, but it proved to be unreliable so they probably regretted their decision.
Well done overview! I remember seeing these back in the day, but never owned one. By then I already had a Macintosh Quadra 630 with built-in video capture I was using.
I don't remember ever hearing of this device, but maybe living in a PAL country of Australia they never released it here. I did have another Amiga product called Digi-View that plugged into the parallel port and you used a B&W camera and took 3 shots through a Colour wheel to get full colour from it.
I had a similar product, it had a printer pass thru and no battery needed. This launched me as an ebay seller in 1997 with my sony camcorder, a tripod and some desk lights. I sold hundreds of products. I had to fto ro my isp member storage use html tags in my listings to show pictures and i did midi files for background music. You had to be a geek. Yes my hardware ran windows 95 and 98. The pictures amazed people.
Wow. What memory lane this has for me. I used to own first generation Epson PhotoPC camera, DCTV and Snappy capture card. You're correct the hardware really didn't change much other than software between versions. The blue logo is actually the battery cover. Cool video!
19:30 Ah yes, GUIs designed right after Windows got support for non-standard window shapes with transparency. That's the very definition of "so concerned with whether the could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Of course, that didn't stop me from downloading dozens of idiotic skins for Winamp and Sonique, haha.
Hi! Oh yes, it is very nostalgic, started on the web surfing in around 1997 and those audio a video players were very beautiful compare of those now, there was K-jofol also that was skinnable like Sonique et Winamp and radio tuners software(to stream radio stations) also were skinnable and at that time the Developers were giving there software for free or if it was shareware, I send an email to tell them I did not have a lot of money and they gave me a key to unblock the potentials of the players they had, all for free, that was the days You know, for us who were born in late 1960's me in 1967, to have those kind of software to listen to radio stations around the world and even to create radio stations of our own, it was fabulous and at least from my point of view, it was a dream and unimaginable. There were no ads like We have now, at least we have ad blockers, but at that time, there was ad blockers but mostly pop up blockers, and there were no social media, but there were IRC or the genesis of the Forums and Yahoo! Groups. Anyway. I feel nostalgic, sorry about my rambling and digress. Take care and have a nice day or try too and be safe. P.S. Later in early 2000s, I tried file sharing for a couple of weeks, but did not like it and it felt wrong in my stomach doing that. So I stopped and never touch those kind of software.
I remember seeing the Snappy being debuted at Comdex Atlanta 1995. The Snappy was easily the highlight of the entire conference. Crowds would gather around 10 deep to watch the presentations. I think some of that may have been because Kiki presented while wearing a very, very short skirt.
Lol. I have mine all boxed back up. Looked at it just yesterday thinking "I should make a video on that thing, haven't seen one". 1 day later in my RU-vid recommended... Time to watch the video.
The "Vido Toaster" connection runs deeper than just Kiki. PLAY was founded by a group that had left NewTek in a spat with Tim Jenison-inluding Brad Carvey (Dana's older brother) who had designed the Toaster and likely this bit of kit.
I had a Snappy. It's probably still in a box in my basement somewhere with other old computer stuff. I remember it worked very well for the time. I could point my handycam (from Radio shack) 8mm camcorder at anything and take pics or connect my VCR to grab images.
I purchased one of these in the mid 90's. I was impressed by how fun and funny the manual was. I don't remember any specifics, but it gave the impression of people who loved what they did and had good senses of humor.
I think I picked one of these up from a thrift store or a friend gave it to me. It actually makes higher quality stills than my later 1999-ish Dazzle USB recorder. Of course, my DVD recorders and Hauppauge cards blow these things out of the water for full video recording. Incidentally, I just lick my 9Vs to test them. Maybe I shouldn't do that.
You're right, I did forget. The thumbnail brought back memories though, never owned one but this was a really prominent device in magazines of the time.
Its my understanding that this was the method by which you got digital photos in 1992. A four head VCR, a camcorder, and something like this. Pretty neat.
I recognize the spokesmodel as Kiki Stockhammer, tech evangelist for the Newtek Video Toaster. I was a huge fan in 1992-93 when I was in high school. Rawr!
I had one of these and also a computer eyes board back in the day too! kiki handed me the snappy and then met her a second time when meeting with newtek getting my video toaster nt / framefactory board had the vtnt up to version 5 when it was eventually discontinued ... the vtnt 5 still works today ..along with the sx8 breakout box (it survived a basement flood even! ) ..and the rs8 switcher! - good times!
That version 3 software is so delightfully late 90s/early 2000s, I love that era of design. This thing seems quite functional, I can see why it was so successful. With a Laserdisc setup this would have been pretty excellent for grabbing HQ frames from movies and such.
I had one! Even though I had a 35mm SLR and a flatbed scanner, The ability to grab stills from a home video was just to cool to pass up. Now I have software that will grab each and every frame from a digital video and neatly deposit them in a folder, The "Snappy" was just Ubercool at the time!
The "taking mutliple shots of the same scene and combining them into one picture to mitigate sensor-bleh" is really nice. I think modern phone cameras do the same but so quick that you don't notice the multiple shots being taken.
Yes the snappy was how I took pictures for ebay items back in 1995, in the first year of ebay. I had a hosting site for them that could hold about 100 low res pictures for said items. I used that snappy up until I got my first digital camera.
You figured out how to get your money's worth out of that thing! Takes me back to 1997 when I used a powermac 8500/120 to grab a pic of a lightning strike I caught on video. Native hardware but video capture was a bad joke. I must have smashed the 'capture' button 100 times while running the tape in real time to get it but it worked. Turned out the lightning really did hit Sutro tower! oh, and de-interlacing was done in photoshop 4.0, FYI.
I had a Snappy, used it for creating eBay photos with the aid of an (even then) ancient VHS JVC camcorder... The alternative for me was scanning Polaroid photos or 35mm prints, both of which were costly. That method was used until I purchased a Fujifilm DX-10 digital still camera in 1998. I think I may still have the Snappy buried somewhere in the garage!
Wow I was just thinking about this device I had in the 90's. Nice that you have one in such excellent condition to feature here. The battery didn't leak! That's some luck!
The good ol' days. I never had one, but this was a tough time in a way, because the expectation of what computers "should do" (and soon would) wasn't quite there yet. I would have got one, but was saved from the need when getting my first computer a Performa 638CD Macintosh with the built-in video tuner which was insanely cool & convenient of the time, and what made it even more useful was the RCA hookups to view and record your camcorder footage in not-too-shabby-for-the-time resolution. This with the Avid Videoshop software to do some rudimentary editing was super duper cool for the mid 90s. It all sure broke my digital photo/video editing hymen.
By the early 2000's USB and DV capture devices can capture full resolution SD video @ 30/25 fps with decent MPEG-2 or DV compression, So the writing was already on the wall for the Snappy, It was a cool gadget in its time nevertheless.
I love watching videos of late 90s tech, it's fascinating to me. All the things we take for granted now...for a screenshot lol it's so cool to me. Snappy is a great name too 📼
Mannn the late 90's/early 00's were a great time for PC components. I remember getting one of these and a 5in bay equalizer mod for my birthday one year😂
“Sorry for the moire pattern. I’ll have a word with my camera operator about it.” Hahaha that was hilarious. I can picture him in the mirror saying “come on, we can do better than this!”
Super handy and really seemed to be easy to use! I remember trying to use hardware and having IRQ issues or assigned port issues haha. I bet that Stonewall 25 video is interesting to watch!
Nice shout out to Fran Blanche (Franlab)! Also, wow, these photos for what hardware's being used, is of quite good quality for the times. Yeah, scanners and all could do a bit better with photographic paper, yet, this has that, well, retro feel.
Thanks for posting this! I had one of these in the 90s - I think I bought it at Target - but I can't really remember what I used it for. It really seems that capturing terrible looking stills from a video camera would be a worthless endeavor, but apparently not back then. LOL!
You could capture video with it even before they officially added support for that. I remember there were was a 3rd party driver floating around in AOL private chat rooms and IRC for it to capture some really low resolution video mpg files. Your method produced much better quality video though. Another side note is that I remember a lot of radio shows had radio ads for the Snappy, mostly Rush Limbaugh that I was forced to listen to back then.
The switch box was another thing I had I had an SCSI cable that used printer port I eventually put in a dedicated SCSI card Symbios I think I had a 9 GB SCSI disk, 20 inches by 16 inches by 10 inches and weighed 40 pounds. I had a flatbed scanner and I had something else that was SCSI but I don't remember what the third device was. Really amazing what we can do today.
It's a rather advanced device for the time it came out in. It could do 1500x1125 during Windows 3.11 days, a resolution that was unusual during that time. If you had one when 3.11 came out, you could still use it for many years as you upgraded machines and it would still have good resolution. If the owner was either still alive or his business kept going the only change I could see to it is added inputs and changing the parallel to USB. The internal capture electronics wouldn't have to be updated.
In 1995 my first college dorm roommate spent hours using his Snappy to capture vhs porn screen grabs and short clips… wonder what Bob is up to now… thanks, I think, for the memory jar.
So this is what people used to save every frame of Leia from RotJ. I wonder if anyone made a custom S-Video adaptor. Man, these photos do look with all the glory of analog camcorder. I need this machine in my life. So if it has 1500x1125 resolution, it could be theoretically used to capture every single frame of a film from VHS/LD to make 1080p "remaster", interesting.
I was sampling the NTSC CVBS signal with a Mirics SDR board and using a homebrew SDL program to decode the recording. It takes about 18 minutes to calculate one minute of video...
