Ridiculous Idea: Dial Up friendly video host

[Aguiluz]

I know this sounds ridiculous, but can you stream video over a 56K connection (3Kbps)?

At such quality that there is minimal buffering?

[APHawkes]

Technically, yes. The quality, though, will be very bad. Maybe you don't remember RealPlayer 1.0 over dial-up, but it was painful. I remember watching a music video the size of a postage stamp and thinking "Hey, that blob of colors almost looks like Eric Clapton!" which was horrible since it was Madonna.

The compression algorithms are much better now, and so you might be able to get a better picture, but it still won't be great. Maybe a matchbook sized video that looks like Sting.

[bicostp]

It's going to look TERRIBLE, but yes it may be theoretically possible.

Here's a copy of the latest AVGN trailer, crunched down to a 712k XviD video. It would still need to buffer, and probably take close to 2 minutes to download completely.

Here's an even smaller, crappier version weighing in at 512k, and it would still have to buffer[/url] This would probably take about a minute 20.

And finally, a 285k version. It looks like garbage. A 3 kilobytes/sec it would take over a minute to download this 42 second video clip. At 7k/sec it would just about play in real time. (But why would you want to?!) Video: Xvid @ 96x64 at 5k/sec. Audio bitrate: 8k/sec mono.

Here's the calculator I used:
http://price.ledtronics.com/dlcalc.asp

[grahf]

Divx/Xvid is terrible at those bitrates, but newer codecs like h.264/x264 are pretty watchable at low bitrate. They are really scalable.

[Aguiluz]

These are one of those "because I can things." XD

[zzattack]

in an optimal case, 56k can reach nearly 6.5kB/s so with minimal buffering the 7kB/s stream might be watched
though i would really recommend getting rid of the 56k crap a soon as you can!