The Redditor in question goes by the name of GreedyPaint and the answer to the question is: yes, they did. And yes, it is obvious that there were some workarounds. For a start, they wrote an x265 codec that would compress full-sized, high-resolution videos down to just 120 x 96 pixels. As for the movie of choice, it was Shrek, which they ripped from a 4.7GB DVD. Bear in mind, the maximum storage capacity of a floppy disk was merely 1.44MB, and GreedyPaint was able to, by some miracle, shrink the entire movie file down to just 1.37MB; approximately 0.03% of the size of the DVD. In addition to the floppy disk, they also created a custom VCR player that could play the movies installed on the storage medium.
The final result of GreedyPaint’s effort is…well, what you’d expect of a machine that clearly isn’t optimised to run movies off a floppy disk. At its best, the old-school TV connected to the “disk player” was stuttering, rendering the movie at what is clearly single-digit framerates. All things considered, this is still just a personal project by GreedyPaint, all done in good fun; it’s not the first time they’ve tried to squash movies into an unconventional medium. In fact, it seems that the next medium they’re going to try and fit a movie into is a vinyl record. (Source Reddit via Gizmodo, Engadget // Image: Reddit) Axl Tan contributed to this article.
