this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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I downloaded dude where's my car over 56k. I'd connect it at the start of the day before leaving for school and then pause the download when I got home so I could play StarCraft online. Took a week to get it, and then it wouldn't play.
Figuring the file just got corrupted during the download, I wrote a program that would break the file up into segments of n bytes and generate a checksum for each segment into another file, then you could take that file and run it against another copy of the original file and find any segments that were different and generate a patch file.
Surprisingly, the guy hosting the file on IRC was willing to run the executable a random user on IRC asked him to (probably noticed me taking that week to download the movie lol), but then his copy and mine were exact matches. Then, he taught me about codecs and I was watching that shitty quality 500MB movie just a little while later.
Crazy that checksums were the first stop before codecs.
First movie I ever pirated was Spider Man 1 (the Tobey McGuire one). Over dial up. Similar situation, it took days to finish with intermittent downloading. The quality was so shitty it was basically unwatchable, even back then when I hadn't yet seen 1080p let alone 4k.
800x600 was a respectable screen resolution in those days and people with decent computers ran at 1024x768, which is more vertical pixels than 720p, though 4:3 ratio. That's not something I'm nostalgic about lol. Winamp could only fit like 30 songs on the screen even if you expanded your playlist to the bottom of the screen (and I have a feeling I might be overestimating it here).
I think the second movie I downloaded was captured by a camcorder in the theatre, including people blocking the view as they walked to and from their seats. Scary Movie iirc.