• Chozo@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    For some reason, this reminds me of the origin of the term “footage”, when referring to filming something. In ye olden days, film was measured in feet. So to capture video on film, you were using up a certain amount of footage/length of film.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Put another way: The fields of modern digital audio file metadata contain keys descended from the specific features of data-storage technology from 1912.

    And people think it’s odd that we still use the floppy disk icon to mean “save”.

    • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Hell, it has to be a steadily increasing number of people who don’t know what the phone icon is supposed to represent.

      • fubo@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Well, someone oughtta sit those kids down and show them I Love Lucy or something, goshdarnit!

        • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          Mom: “Your phone is ringing.”

          Son: “Could you answer it real quick while I wash my hands?”

          Mom: “How do I answer it?”

          Son: “Hit the buttplug.”

      • radix@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        This got me thinking: Does this mean that kids these days aren’t doing the banana telephone thing? I’m young enough to never have seen a telephone (as opposed to a mobile phone) other than in movies and museums, but maybe I lived in sufficient temporal proximity to the era of wired telephones to have banana telephones as a part of my childhood.

        • davidgro@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          But it’s the best, beats the rest! Cellular, modular, interactivodular!

          Seriously though, because of Raffi, it might be a few generations before people in general don’t know of Banana Phones.

        • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          That got me thinking. The universal hand sign for “call me” or “I’ll call you” is to stick out your thumb and pinkie and hold your hand to your face like you’re talking on the phone. It just doesn’t work the same if you hold your hand flat like it’s a smartphone.

          • Mr_Blott@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Nah the younguns think you have to hold a phone like a fuckin slice of toast now anyway

          • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            Hold hand in claw (like you’re going to grab a giant burger). Move hand toward side of head. Mouth the words “call me”. It works.

  • Selmafudd@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    This is great.

    Another music related oddity I only recently found out, Laserdiscs are analog not digital…

    • ShunkW@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Technically later ones used digital audio. But yeah, it’s because they use frequency modulation rather than binary pitting

    • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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      9 months ago

      Laserdiscs were huge for being able to stop on a single frame - I worked for a place that used them for language teaching, so you had to stop dead on a sentence for it to make sense. At the time mpeg could only stop on iframes that could be 10 seconds apart, and paying to get iframes mastered where you needed them was mucho expensive (even decoding required hardware… mpeg encoding in software was a pipe dream).

      Compressed video still has this problem to some extent but it’s mostly worked around in software.

      Also the hardware to interface to a PC was basically a simple analogue capture card and a serial link for the control. Cheap, at least compared to the mpeg decoders of the day.

      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        For sure! The first time I saw my animation professor pull out a laserdisc, I started to have doubts on my colleges budget, but damn, crisp, clean frame by frame of Bugs Bunny. Couldn’t be beat!

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      What a blip on the radar they were. I remember watching a video on acid rain in first grade, so early '90s, and that was it, never saw it again.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 months ago

    Another fun fact: They were often not A side and B side on a single disc, but something like A side and F side. You put the whole stack on the record player spindle, it feeds one down, plays the top side, feeds the next down, play the top, and so on. Then when all the top sides were done you flipped the whole stack over and did it again. Each 78 only had enough room for about 5 minutes per side.

    My grandparents had a number of these.