2023-07-28

I have been enjoying the Old Computer Challenge phlog posts. I was
thinking about participating with an old MDD G4 PowerMac but I
pretty much realized that I'm more in love with the idea of the
OCC rather than actually participating.

To be more specific, I adore old operating systems and UIs and
hyper-efficient software and command lines...but the hardware part?
not so much.

The fact that we all connect to SDF to use gopher and links and
irssi is already a pretty fulfilling "retro" computing style for
me.

I feel like if I had some version of Unix with a useable version
of SSH, then I would be 90% able to do everything I need on a daily
basis with one very big exception...youtube.

Youtube can be challenging on old computers. The first problem is
that in the OCC, you are extremely limited with CPU and memory
which will in all cases preclude the use of a modern browser.

EDIT: I have seen some OCC participants have success with an
application called minitube. I don't have direct knowledge
of this app since I use fedora but it appears to enable
substantial youtube functionality. I wasn't aware of this app
before I wrote the next few paragraphs :-)

Now we can't really  browse youtube with a command browser like
"links" since you basically need Javascript for youtube. However,
we can basically google search for youtube channels and video URLs
or even find some way to get youtube RSS feeds for the creators we
like.

But the next issue is downloading those youtube files. The best
youtube video downloader is a python program called yt-dlp (or its
predecessor youtube-dl).

so the next challenge is whether your old computer can actually
run python. If it can, you are good to go and you can start
downloading videos. However, if you can't...I'm not exactly sure
how you get around this. Maybe compiling python into C using Cython?
Not sure if anyone has tried that with yt-dlp.

Ok assuming you are able to download the youtube video into an MP4
file. Can your hardware actually decode and play an MP4 file? Assume
you get something reasonably watchable like a 360p youtube video,
can your hardware actually play it?

For me, the ability to download youtube videos and play them with
no dropped frames basically sets the lower bound for how old of a
computer that I would be able to use on a daily basis.  Because
for almost all other tasks, we can just use Unix tools or just log
into SDF.

Based on my previous experience with my MDD G4 powermac, the main
issue would be getting video acceleration to work under linux.
Assuming that I could get that to work then I'm reasonably confident
that the OCC wouldn't be an issue with me for that computer.

The real question is how much older in terms of computer hardware
could I go to fulfill the conditions (useable python, SSH, and MP4
decode)?

I'd be interested to see if anyone can go older than a G4 Mac. One
way you could "cheat" would be to transcode the mp4 into a more
supported retro format?

Here's some old discussion for doing just that with an SGI machine:
http://archive.irixnet.org/apocrypha/nekonomicon/forum/16/16728510/1.html

anyways, just some food for thought.