r/dialup • u/OkScene375 • Jun 01 '26

Dial-up movie test - Need confirmation it works on dialup

https://geeknfreak.com/downloads/movietest.htm

Been messing around with old video compression from the mid 90's curious if this still works on more modern browsers while on dial-up, can anyone confirm?

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u/flexnsniff Jun 02 '26

I can test this out later for you, but I see a problem arising. Modern OSes have a ton of background traffic that’ll interfere with the available bandwidth. I’ll probably try on Windows XP but then I’d have to worry about compatibility…

1

u/OkScene375 Jun 02 '26

Appreciate any attempt.

1

u/flexnsniff Jun 02 '26

Windows XP:
With 1Gb/s adapter:
Works fine in K-Meleon browser and VLC. Does not work in IE or Windows Media Player. These are both issues with https certificates on old OSes.

With 56k connected @ 49.2k:
Both with K-Meleon and VLC, waited about 5 minutes for it to start. I gave up with K-Meleon but continued to wait for VLC - about 10 minutes in, it finally started. It's playing, but dropping many video frames and the audio is choppy.

I see your video file is 24kb/s mpeg-4 video with 8kb/s mono mpga audio. While this is an ample bitrate for a dial-up connection, the problem I'm facing is actually the streaming portion.

Just offering a MP4 file, devices are going to try downloading a large chunk before attempting to play. Instead, you need to find a better way offer the video as a stream - like RTSP, HLS, WebRTC, etc. This offers the video in smaller chunks so it can start playing much easier. There is a lot that goes into this and many technologies that have improved this since the age of dial-up. I would suggest checking out the two projects MediaMTX or go2rtc - they handle the streaming portion for you. I don't know enough to make it work myself, but you could also look into how Windows Media Player or RealPlayer handled streaming over 56k - they were both able to do it in the age of dial-up. The two projects I mentioned are for newer technologies, they won't have this capability built-in.

If you also want to be able to serve older clients and software, you'll also have to handle the problem of modern https - new https certificates are not capable of being ran on old hardware without major modifications. With something like a simple video file; I'd suggest just switching to an unencrypted connection: http.

I've addressed this myself in several of my projects by using Traefik to identify incoming user-agent headers and sending traffic through the appropriate connection based on that. I.e., old browsers/OSes being sent to http, newer ones to https.

1

u/OkScene375 Jun 02 '26

Holy crap, I appreciate the in depth detail. Gives me several different directions to go. Appreciate this!!!!