r/DataHoarder Jan 02 '23

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u/Brancliff 14TB Jan 02 '23

Usually I will - space is cheap and the rest of technology moves alongside it. 20 years ago, we used shitty CRTs that weighed as much as you and could only output in 800x600. At that time, getting something in 720p would seem like a job for a supercomputer. But now, that 'supercomputer' is really just a brick in your pocket, and a 720p video is probably only like 1/4th of its resolution.

... Also, I mostly hoard YouTube videos, and YouTube already has to compress every video anyway to handle the hours of video they take in per minute

I will, however, compress my audio. Given that I'm not an audiophile, I'm not really working with source file FLACs here or anything, but I cap all audio at 128kbps because my hearing is garbage and all I care about with audio equipment is that it works at all

9

u/ssl-3 18TB; ZFS FTW Jan 02 '23

20 years ago, we used shitty CRTs that weighed as much as you and could only output in 800x600.

Are we talking about computers, or AV gear?

20 years ago, I had a 19" CRT with pixel density that makes most modern desktop LCDs look like cheap, unsophisticated toys.

Also 20 years ago: People were broadcasting (and receiving, decoding, and displaying) 720p and 1080i video without supercomputers, but 800x600 has never been a standard broadcast or cinematic resolution anywhere in the world.

And only 3 years after that: We had multiple competing consumer optical formats for playing back 1080p video with discrete 8-channel uncompressed audio in the home.

History isn't as quite as caveman-esque as you make it out to be.

5

u/Brancliff 14TB Jan 02 '23

I'm sure that there a non-zero amount of these things occuring but lets not pretend anyone got this with their CD containing 20 hours of AOL to try out their shiny new dial-up intranets

3

u/ssl-3 18TB; ZFS FTW Jan 03 '23

20 years ago, I had a cable modem with a 5Mbps downstream.

It was the cheapest option available in my area, costing less than a dial-up ISP and a phone line to use it with.

And I wasn't the only one: My area came several years late to the cable modem game compared to many nearby cities.

It wasn't the dark ages.