Uploaded March 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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Have some more Black Mesa gameplay footage, encoded in the extremely-outdated digital video format known as Cinepak! In addition, we reduced the color pallet from several million down to a mere 256. We have decided to make this a video series and play through the rest of this game in this very old video format.

Also, Black Mesa is a fantastic remake of the 1998 classic Half-Life!

Since Cinepak is a 32-bit program and can only use a single processor core, encoding times are very slow in this format at high resolutions and frame rates. This video took over 16 hours to render out as a result!

Fun facts about Cinepak!
-First released in 1991 and is among the oldest compressed digital video formats in existence

-Designed to deliver 320 x 240 video at 12 or more frames per second on a single-speed [1X] CD-ROM, which was quite impressive back in 1991

-Works on very weak hardware, even for back in 1991

-Supports 256 color [8-bit color], 24-bit color and even a gray-scale mode

-Used for full-motion video on video game consoles such as the Sega CD, 3DO and Atari Jaguar

-Many early to mid-90s CD-ROM games on DOS and Windows 95 used Cinepak for full-motion video

-Has both 16-bit and 32-bit versions, but can only make use of a single processor core, meaning encoding times, even on the most powerful modern CPUs available, can be extremely slow at high resolutions and frame rates

-Is no longer supported on new operating systems and media players. Currently, only the latest version of QuickTime on Windows is the most recent media player that can play back AVI or MOV files that use Cinepak video encoding

-Video encoded with Cinepak is rejected by video and social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter due to large file sizes and simply being extremely out of date. We get around this by encoding the Cinepak video files into high-quality MP4s instead.

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