I’ve been playing with encoding videos at very low bitrates. My entry in the Small File Media Festival won Lowest Bitrate, clocking in at around 30Kbps. You can see it here on archive.org as an MKV with h265 video and ogg/opus audio. It was fun, but I thought we could do better.

Flash Gordon was a TV series for the 1954-1955 season, produced in west Berlin. The series was direct to syndication throughout many parts of the US, and specifically aired on the east coast on the DuMont Television Network. The show is now in the public domain, and about half the episodes produced are available on home video. Today, I present an episode we captured that is not available on home video

I have made no secret of my love of Space Patrol, and in fact I’ve spent dozens of hours over the last year digitizing episodes of Space Patrol which I have spoken about several times on various social media platforms. Space Patrol isn’t the only neat forgotten 50s Sci-Fi show, though. Today, I want to share an episode of, and spill a few bits about, one that doesn’t get talked about often, which gave us the first screen apperance of Star Trek’s Scotty!

Alright, so I’ve gone down a weird rabbit hole looking in to early high definition video, and I am getting way too in to this (like, getting ready to spend some money even) so before I do that I want to capture my findings here (and share them with fellow video nerds.)

Consider this an experiment.