Sadly it was then recorded in the camera and then blasted out through our modern screens with UA-cam compression in the mix. Alas 😔 (I'm just being dramatic lol)
I like that screensaver mention, as a lot of modern smart TVs will rotate through a lot of beautiful, but generic, stock photos as a screensaver to prevent burn-in on OLED/QLED TVs.
Paired with a projector, I could see this thing being used for slideshows in schools. Kind of thoughtless they didn't put a USB or parallel port on it and let it do double duty as a true floppy drive.
And then hack it somehow to turn it into a way to connect your PC to a larger TV and broadcast movies and other stuff. Or display stuff from the USB port.
@@blaskkaffe True, although 2001 was right around the time when USB ports were starting to become a lot more common and while flash drives from back then seem tiny now, a 64 or 128MB drive is huge compared to a floppy, so there would have been a very clear advantage to including a USB port.
@@SilentdragonDe yes but USB was mostly for printers, webcams and HID devices until USB 2.0. Remeber getting a HUGE 256mb usb stick in 2003 and thinking it was a incredible upgrade from carrying around a box of floppies in my bag. It was however quite common that USB plug and play drivers were not installed on computers with windows 98. If you wanted to transfer a file and make sure you could always read it floppy drives were king until 2005 or something even though they were a dying/almost dead format by then. Back when this Floppy image viewer was made drivers were still a hassle, not everyone had internet and the drivers that came with devices rarely worked properly unless you had very new and standard equipment. Pretty cool device made in a very strange tech era.
@@blaskkaffe Desktops at the time yes, but laptops would often omit either a CD drive, or floppy drive to save space. Some would let you swap one out for the other. Or if your computer had a broken floppy drive and you were planning to buy another.
late 90s early 2000s were a great time for medium exploration. It was exciting to not really know what the future held for data mediums like floppy disks.
Holy cow, I have never seen such a peripheral for televisions! A floppy drive for TVs? Sounds like something that would have been invented in the 1990s with compatible software, etc. because that's when floppy disks were in use significantly. So it's kind of interesting to see that it was actually invented just after both the third millennium and the 21st century began. I will have to see if I can collect it and get it to be displayed on my family's 2018 LG 4K TV via a ClonerAlliance HDML-Cloner Box Pro. Great work on this video!
Floppies were still in use a lot during the early 2000's, I remember going to a cyber coffee with dozens to try to download abandonware, and we sent photos to family emails, all with floppies. Once I had 512kb internet, the first "broadband" here, floppies were a thing of the past and we started burning cds/dvds, because we could download a lot bigger files... remember the first download with dial up of a 100mb ebook over emule, took months!
Heh, I used to visit a local internet centre in the late 90s that had a t1 line and about 30 pcs you could book an hour on (for £1 iirc). You had to buy the floppies from them but could then download pretty much anything. I used to get roms and abandonware. There didnt seem to be any limit on what you could access but a supervisor monitored what each pc was doing from his office and would berate you and tell you to cut it out if you went on a warez or porn site. I bet those pcs were riddled with malware lol. Biggest file I ever downloaded on dialup was a 25mb kayaking game using one of those downloading clients that could resume a connection if it crapped out. It took the best part of a day to complete. That same file takes a few seconds on my current fttp connection, amazing how far the tech has come in such a short time.
In 2001, I downloaded the demo for Midtown Madness 2, over dialup. It was a whopping 31MB and would have taken several hours. Fortunately, my parents had just upgraded to an unlimited dialup plan. Then my friend wanted to play it on his computer and his parents were still paying $1/hour for dialup, so we spent several hours splitting it into 1.4MB files, writing it to the 6 or so spare floppies we found lying around and biking back and forwards between our homes. It was not a successful operation, the scavengef floppies (because nobody was buying new floppies at that point) kept dying on us and corrupting the files. Floppies were next to useless by 2001. If the file was small enough for a floppy, you were better off emailing it. Hell, we even occasionally emailed files from one end of the house to the other (two computers, two dialup modems). And if the file was large, it just seemed to be pain and suffering. I think we successfully moved games of 3-5MB by floppy, but never anything larger than 10MB. Getting a CD writer in 2002 was a huge upgrade.
I stopped using floppies around 2002. People forget how terribly unreliable they were and useless amount of storage space. My first USB drive was like 32MB and was amazing
@@thedopplereffect00 yeah, floppies were terriblely unreliable, at least in 2000/2001. For some reason I don't remember it being a major issue in the 90s
I still have a similar product from that time, but from Iomega: the Zip "Fotoshow". It is a Zip 250MB drive with A/V (composite + S-video) out for TVs (there are a few videos about this drive here on YT). It was a far more elaborate product (for a higher price tag) with the advantage of also being usable as a Zip drive if plugged to a PC or Mac (it has a USB interface as well). While the Iomega drive didn't have the companion software to create slides on your PC, it did have a slightly more usable interface that could be controled with the included I/R remote. And while there weren't any cameras ever released that used Zip disks for storage, the drive also has compact flash and smart memory card readers in the front, that allows you to copy photos from those (formats that were becoming popular for cameras at the time) directly to a Zip disk by pressing one button on the drive itself (although the drive cannot display the images from the cards directly on the TV, which was a bummer). It is also a nifty little gadget from that lovely bygone era that you should check it out if you can get your hands on one.
Such an odd thing given it's release date. Apple had already made floppy discs uncool by ditching the drive from their iMac, and even Microsoft themselves were pushing recordable CDs as the media to use with the inclusion of CD burning support on Windows XP. If this was launched a year or two earlier it would've made a lot more sense.
you love to see a fellow tmg fan in the comments. what's your favorite song on zopilote machine? mine's grendel's mother but i'll also go to bat for azo tle nelli in tlalticpac and we have seen the enemy
I’d of liked to see the actual floppy contents, I’m guessing it’d been just a disk with jpegs at super high compression likely at 320 x 240, as getting 10 photos on a floppy by 2001 would have been a tall order as digital cams were in the low multi mega pixel. I think in 2003 when I got my first digital camera, the Powershot A70 had AV cables and it was an entry level camera so MS had a very narrow window here as cameras were offering the same features. Also, would have liked to see what happened if you tried to stick your own images on a floppy (would it display a 640 x 480 image? Etc).
Whilst it has other hidden files (an INDEX.BIN, 2 HTM files, a JS file, and many GIF files for UI elements), it is basically just JPG files on a floppy disk that it knows how to read. Apparently all files must be 640x480 and lower than 120 KB to be playable.
Not quite the same but long before Windows 98 even was a thing I used to use the Amiga computers TV output to record straight to video and made a lot of slideshows set to music with fancy transitions too. My fave thing to do was to record the demo's including game demo's in 3D. So while my original Amiga could barely throw 5fps around in a 3D game, maybe 10 in a simpler one. If you recorded to video then played it back 2x speed you got to see what accelerated 3D would look like long before it was possible to do in real-time. It was fun but even as far back as then it was very limited and no one wanted to watch my slideshows after seeing one. One is all you need to know you're done with that lol
I used to make music videos using Fantavision for the visuals on the Amiga then record the output to vhs through a Rokgen genlock before dubbing a soundtrack on afterwards. Fantavision could do a steady 50fps for a nice smooth PAL output and generated vector shapes that could be warped and animated. Using 2 vhs decks and compositing live video with Amiga graphics was loads of fun. I didn't have a vhs deck with flying erase heads so to get a seamless edit you had to time the delay between pressing record and the heads engaging the tape with a stopwatch and listening for the sound the deck made. My Akai recording deck did have independent dual audio channels that could be dubbed onto whilst the video was playing which made the soundtrack easier to sync and layer with the visuals. Fun times and a bit of a lost art in these days of digital editing software.
Well.. In 2001... I used a CD burner to put all my pictures and a DVD player to read them all on a TV, but it wasn't that common yet I guess... My computer had a S-Video output also.
Not sure if it's the same exact one as in the video, but there's one with the id microsofttvphotoviewersetupdisc1998 on there. It would be nice if the demo one was added though as well.
At the beginning when you showed the device and the floppy which was to contain the images, I thought of all of the 35mm film I had processed through Seattle Film Works. After processing, they printed the images, scanned them to 3-1/2" disks, and included a CD with viewing software. This was intended for use on a PC, not the TV - but the images on disks were still pretty nifty at the time. BTW: I have a Mavica within my view as I type this.
Tbh Microsoft picture it express is so underrated. The way i got it was because it came with the cds of your photos when you got them developed at walmart (for my family at the time it was the 2004 version I'm pretty sure) and that's what I used to learn graphic design and photo editing as a kid lol. For what it is, its really easy to use and has a good amount of features. My mom and I even found a way for us to still use it with modern windows
A mechanic workshop I used to work at had one of these, was hardly ever used for many reasons. But it was used as the boss had this dangerous dodgy weld xray machine that would spit out the "images" to floppy, he would then take them to his pc, convert them to jpeg then display on the tiny crt he had in the office. Boss said, so not first hand knowledge, he brought it second hand off some shady guy in a van. Once he found out what it could do he saw so many uses for it. His idea was check for cracks in engine blocks, transmissions, chassis etc. What it was used for was the very rare chassis weld check, and that was only when we would get new mechanics come in and I think he wanted to show it off. We were all terrified of the thing, especially the warning labels he had rubbed off with a wire wheel.
Nice video, but I would have been interested on the data format stored on the floppy disk created by the proprietary software - i.e. if it's possible to retrieve at least the photos from the disk without the viewer device or software.
It just puts the image files directly onto the disk. This is why you can put a floppy disk directly from a Mavica into the Photo Viewer and it'll display them just fine.
I like the email option, your albums could do double duty as a nice tv slideshow and a conveniently sized file format for sharing with friends who live further away
I stopped using floppy disks sometime in 1998 when Windows install CD/DVDs became bootable. (NT4/98/ME/2000) Started building all my machines without floppy disks.
I have memories from the late 90's of a computer lab teacher busting out a digital camera that saved to floppy disks, taking photos of our class, then pulling out the floppy and popping it into something like this to put on the class projector. I remember how excited she was to have this new toy to play with and I really wanted to play with it, myself, but was not allowed because it was the only one the school had and was probably very expensive. This would have been right about 1999, _maybe_ spring of 2000. I know for certain that it couldn't have been 2001, because I changed schools in the fall of 2000 and moved across the country in mid 2001. Perhaps this was a product that was given a trial run in the educational market? Or maybe my school just had a similar, but different product that was intended for enterprise and educational customers? I know these cameras had been around for a couple of years by this time, but it sounds like these direct photo readers were not around until floppy disk cameras (and floppies, themselves) were already becoming fairly obsolete. It sounds like it couldn't have been this exact product because this product required you to use a PC and some software to format the disks for this thing, but perhaps it was something similar? I could also very easily be misremembering, and maybe they just had the projector hooked up to a computer, but I am pretty certain that this isn't the case because I remember being completely blown away and fascinated by not just the camera, but also by how my teacher seamlessly popped it into a standalone little doohickey that made the photos she had just taken appear on the projector. I was already familiar with projectors being hooked up to computers from our computer lab classes (which is what the teacher used to demonstrate what she wanted us to do) so I doubt very much that I would have been very impressed with a projector plugged into a PC. The only other thing I can think it could be is that maybe the camera itself was plugged into the projector. Most camcorders and many early digital cameras at the time either had RCA out jacks or had split-out cables from their proprietary jacks that could be used to put up slide shows and play video direct to TV (or to output footage to VHS and/ or editing rigs)
Do you mean the keyboard? I have one of those but can't get it to work because the drivers/software work ONLY with XP. 🤦 I tried finding a third-party fingerprint program, but just can't get it to work. 😕
Even if you wanted to view images on your TV back in 2001, you could just burn albums to a DVD and show them in a DVD player, which was far more common than the Microsoft TV floppy drive.
Thanks for the awesome video Michael! Quick question- did you get the chance to test the quality of the photos when you have 40 of them saved to the floppy disk, rather than 15? Just curious how much lower the quality is. If not though all good! Have a great week!
I checked myself. Apparently the floppy disks made have a README.HTM file that sages images must be 640 x 480, and each image must be smaller than 120KB. Since the software apparently only supports 1.44 MB floppy disks, theorerically you could have up to 12 at the highest quality. Once I added 20 pictures, it effectively warned me that the quality would be lowered and offered me to continue or cancel and make a second album. After I get up to 40, it won't let me add any more, and saving that to disk, the leagest picture is 50kb, and it's using 1.33 MB (57.5 KB free) of the disk.
What an interesting piece of oddware! It especially would've made sense if you had an early digital camera with no screen, like a lot of cheaper models of the late '90s-early '00s. But it would've been largely redundant for me, even if we'd grabbed one for cheap later. My family's* first digital camera -- a fairly basic 2000s Kodak, bought on closeout in 2003 -- _had_ a screen, and probably video out too. And my own Canon PowerShot A550 (bought in 2007) _very much_ has video out, via a tiny 2.5 mm barrel jack. I even plugged it into my grandma's TV a few times to show some pictures. * actually Dad's; I borrowed it a lot
I'm pretty sure that the software create new images with the captions on them when you are writing the disc. That's why it cannot be toggled. But if the device can remember orientation, it mean it can write to the disc and thus changing the time setting would have been trivial to include (unless you need a new button or something)
That's pretty neat. As in, you found the software for connecting it to the computer? I recently found a Palm III at Goodwill for $2, it's missing the battery cover but it works
@@RocketWire oh, that’s neat! Yeah, I got almost everything that was in the box except for the actual device and its charger. Given that it was a goodwill I’m guessing that they were unfortunately stolen. There was also some kind of weird female to male serial adapter thing, but it somehow disappeared between me grabbing it, and me putting my stuff on the checkout counter. Now I’m debating whether to open up the disks to see if they’re still readable or just to keep it sealed.
@@RocketWire the things I did get aside from the disks were the leather case, and a pamphlet that I’m guessing were like some sort of instruction manual for it.
This would work well for what we now call "digital signage" which is used in office buildings and shopping malls. Except now we do with USB flash drives plugged directly into the TV!
kinda made me remember about the time when i compressed spongebob's first eposide (help wanted) and typed it on a floppy disk. i wonder how it'll work on this since i still have that floppy
I don't know if it was ever done but this could have also been used for funerals. For the time this would have been one of the easiest ways to set up a slide show.
Just connected the camera to the tv back in the day. Also love for the consistency of the ui elements of both programs. Mayosoft just did an other version of mixing a bunch of different things together, partly 9x aka 2000 style elements and partly Luna theme. 😂
Floppy disks, especially 3.5" ones, were super ubiquitous, as evidenced by the fact that you can buy them new in box online as well as in massive stacks used.
This feels like something businesses might have used more than anyone, it's a thing you can plug into a TV and have it roll around some advertisement slides, which you can easily swap in and out by changing a disc.
I would like to see what is inside of it and know whether it is actual microsoft software on it or just a rebranded product. It is probably some specialized chip, but it would be cool to retrofit it with linux or RTOS and play doom on it :P
I just saw one of these this morning at a local thrift store. I passed as it was $12. I also had an Iomega Zip Disk version someone gave me a couple months ago, but it was dead.
3:56 "You were supposed to take that off" like most stickers on laptop and people STILL keep them even though they are disgracious and useless. I always remove them from my customer's computers. And if they "complain" (which they never do) I tell them that the cleaner that I use is just too powerful and ruined the sticker, and that it's supposed to stay when exposed on shelves and meant to be removed :)
Microsoft was actively hostile to PNG in the early 2000s and their support for it was minimal. It was an open source format, and they still hated open source. Internet Explorer 6 didn't even support PNG transparency.
By 2001 I had a PlayStation2 modded and had all multimedia stuff on there, everything I ever needed. Basically it also had a photo feature where a DVD folder full of photos going on playback rotation or manual view. I took photos, if they were on USB then played them from there. If I burned them on a disc then it was played back from there. So next to that, I see zero use in this device maybe if it came out 10 years prior then yeah I might had picked it up.
This is why MJD is so good. He even busted out the CRT television for the demo so it could be seen as God intended. Well done sir.
Sadly it was then recorded in the camera and then blasted out through our modern screens with UA-cam compression in the mix.
Alas 😔
(I'm just being dramatic lol)
@@mme725yt compression isn't thaaaaat bad....
Or is it? (vsauce themes starts playing)
Biblically accurate analog display w floppy disk reader 👼
Retro console collector here. I still rock the CRT I grew up with
"As God intended" ... indeed... INDEED!
I like that screensaver mention, as a lot of modern smart TVs will rotate through a lot of beautiful, but generic, stock photos as a screensaver to prevent burn-in on OLED/QLED TVs.
Or you can program said screensaver to display pictures from your online photo service. Such as Google photos or Picassa.
@@John_Locke_108Picasa is dead
@@DryPaperHammerBro Yep killed by google
@@DryPaperHammerBro Sad news.
I just turn my tv off to save my screen
This is one of the things I love about this channel, we also get the obscure alongside more known stuff, great variety
Paired with a projector, I could see this thing being used for slideshows in schools. Kind of thoughtless they didn't put a USB or parallel port on it and let it do double duty as a true floppy drive.
And then hack it somehow to turn it into a way to connect your PC to a larger TV and broadcast movies and other stuff. Or display stuff from the USB port.
Wouldn’t have made sense at the time. Not all computers had USB but 99.9% had a floppy drive.
@@blaskkaffe True, although 2001 was right around the time when USB ports were starting to become a lot more common and while flash drives from back then seem tiny now, a 64 or 128MB drive is huge compared to a floppy, so there would have been a very clear advantage to including a USB port.
@@SilentdragonDe yes but USB was mostly for printers, webcams and HID devices until USB 2.0. Remeber getting a HUGE 256mb usb stick in 2003 and thinking it was a incredible upgrade from carrying around a box of floppies in my bag.
It was however quite common that USB plug and play drivers were not installed on computers with windows 98.
If you wanted to transfer a file and make sure you could always read it floppy drives were king until 2005 or something even though they were a dying/almost dead format by then.
Back when this Floppy image viewer was made drivers were still a hassle, not everyone had internet and the drivers that came with devices rarely worked properly unless you had very new and standard equipment.
Pretty cool device made in a very strange tech era.
@@blaskkaffe Desktops at the time yes, but laptops would often omit either a CD drive, or floppy drive to save space. Some would let you swap one out for the other. Or if your computer had a broken floppy drive and you were planning to buy another.
Great job. I always enjoy these older tech videos.
@Itz_Oliverstyle early acess to the video
late 90s early 2000s were a great time for medium exploration. It was exciting to not really know what the future held for data mediums like floppy disks.
*media
medium* @@toseltreps1101
When it comes to PNG images, it might also be because that was a pretty rare format back in 2001, and practically never used for photos.
Yeah. And modern PNG would probably be quite different?
PNG images are very large for photo type data as it's lossless
Photoshop 4.0 supported .PNG in 1996. Windows XP in 2001 shipped with Microsoft Paint which worked with .png files.
Your channel and LGR are a natural pairing.
it's really cool seeing videos about tech that was used before I was born. These videos really show me what life was like before I was born
I was so excited on seeing the thumbnail itself. I love these vintage 2000s techs and the beautiful Microsoft logo at that time is soo nostalgicc.
"...instead of everybody huddling around a 15" monitor" - proceeds to use the TV Photo Viewer with a 14" TV...
I like your humor :D
Back when Microsoft used to make stuff. I miss those days
These are my favorite kinds of videos! Something about old media solutions is so cool!
I’ve been always interested on how old tech works, been watching this guy for 2 years and I learned a lot
It's so heartwarming when Michael is always enjoying unboxing everything every video. ❤
Holy cow, I have never seen such a peripheral for televisions! A floppy drive for TVs? Sounds like something that would have been invented in the 1990s with compatible software, etc. because that's when floppy disks were in use significantly. So it's kind of interesting to see that it was actually invented just after both the third millennium and the 21st century began. I will have to see if I can collect it and get it to be displayed on my family's 2018 LG 4K TV via a ClonerAlliance HDML-Cloner Box Pro. Great work on this video!
Floppies were still in use a lot during the early 2000's, I remember going to a cyber coffee with dozens to try to download abandonware, and we sent photos to family emails, all with floppies.
Once I had 512kb internet, the first "broadband" here, floppies were a thing of the past and we started burning cds/dvds, because we could download a lot bigger files... remember the first download with dial up of a 100mb ebook over emule, took months!
I stopped using floppies sometime around 2005 but I stll have tons of them somewhere around the house.
Heh, I used to visit a local internet centre in the late 90s that had a t1 line and about 30 pcs you could book an hour on (for £1 iirc). You had to buy the floppies from them but could then download pretty much anything. I used to get roms and abandonware. There didnt seem to be any limit on what you could access but a supervisor monitored what each pc was doing from his office and would berate you and tell you to cut it out if you went on a warez or porn site. I bet those pcs were riddled with malware lol.
Biggest file I ever downloaded on dialup was a 25mb kayaking game using one of those downloading clients that could resume a connection if it crapped out. It took the best part of a day to complete. That same file takes a few seconds on my current fttp connection, amazing how far the tech has come in such a short time.
In 2001, I downloaded the demo for Midtown Madness 2, over dialup. It was a whopping 31MB and would have taken several hours. Fortunately, my parents had just upgraded to an unlimited dialup plan.
Then my friend wanted to play it on his computer and his parents were still paying $1/hour for dialup, so we spent several hours splitting it into 1.4MB files, writing it to the 6 or so spare floppies we found lying around and biking back and forwards between our homes.
It was not a successful operation, the scavengef floppies (because nobody was buying new floppies at that point) kept dying on us and corrupting the files.
Floppies were next to useless by 2001. If the file was small enough for a floppy, you were better off emailing it. Hell, we even occasionally emailed files from one end of the house to the other (two computers, two dialup modems). And if the file was large, it just seemed to be pain and suffering. I think we successfully moved games of 3-5MB by floppy, but never anything larger than 10MB.
Getting a CD writer in 2002 was a huge upgrade.
I stopped using floppies around 2002. People forget how terribly unreliable they were and useless amount of storage space. My first USB drive was like 32MB and was amazing
@@thedopplereffect00 yeah, floppies were terriblely unreliable, at least in 2000/2001. For some reason I don't remember it being a major issue in the 90s
It's so heartwarming when Michael is always enjoying on boxing everything every video. ❤
I still have a similar product from that time, but from Iomega: the Zip "Fotoshow". It is a Zip 250MB drive with A/V (composite + S-video) out for TVs (there are a few videos about this drive here on YT). It was a far more elaborate product (for a higher price tag) with the advantage of also being usable as a Zip drive if plugged to a PC or Mac (it has a USB interface as well).
While the Iomega drive didn't have the companion software to create slides on your PC, it did have a slightly more usable interface that could be controled with the included I/R remote. And while there weren't any cameras ever released that used Zip disks for storage, the drive also has compact flash and smart memory card readers in the front, that allows you to copy photos from those (formats that were becoming popular for cameras at the time) directly to a Zip disk by pressing one button on the drive itself (although the drive cannot display the images from the cards directly on the TV, which was a bummer).
It is also a nifty little gadget from that lovely bygone era that you should check it out if you can get your hands on one.
Cool piece of hardware. Such a 2000s concept. Thanks for this video!
You never fail to surprise me with stuff I never heard of 😂
i love the floppy disk set you filmed this one in
Such an odd thing given it's release date. Apple had already made floppy discs uncool by ditching the drive from their iMac, and even Microsoft themselves were pushing recordable CDs as the media to use with the inclusion of CD burning support on Windows XP.
If this was launched a year or two earlier it would've made a lot more sense.
Apple had the equivalent to this with a CD drive, the PowerCD, back in 1993 *and* it attached to your computer as a normal CD drive
I can imagine this being in a store showing pictures of the items and discounts they do
Thanks for showing some love to Zopilote Machine, even if it was sutil. Such an underrated album
you love to see a fellow tmg fan in the comments. what's your favorite song on zopilote machine? mine's grendel's mother but i'll also go to bat for azo tle nelli in tlalticpac and we have seen the enemy
I love the way the Yamashita album art looks at 14:07!
this is darn worth it already
I’d of liked to see the actual floppy contents, I’m guessing it’d been just a disk with jpegs at super high compression likely at 320 x 240, as getting 10 photos on a floppy by 2001 would have been a tall order as digital cams were in the low multi mega pixel. I think in 2003 when I got my first digital camera, the Powershot A70 had AV cables and it was an entry level camera so MS had a very narrow window here as cameras were offering the same features.
Also, would have liked to see what happened if you tried to stick your own images on a floppy (would it display a 640 x 480 image? Etc).
Whilst it has other hidden files (an INDEX.BIN, 2 HTM files, a JS file, and many GIF files for UI elements), it is basically just JPG files on a floppy disk that it knows how to read. Apparently all files must be 640x480 and lower than 120 KB to be playable.
I was expecting this too, to see the contents of the floppy and how are the settings saved.
I love the floppy disk background!!!
How many here remember nights with your aunts and uncles watching slides of your family vacation. Good memories.
Not quite the same but long before Windows 98 even was a thing I used to use the Amiga computers TV output to record straight to video and made a lot of slideshows set to music with fancy transitions too. My fave thing to do was to record the demo's including game demo's in 3D. So while my original Amiga could barely throw 5fps around in a 3D game, maybe 10 in a simpler one. If you recorded to video then played it back 2x speed you got to see what accelerated 3D would look like long before it was possible to do in real-time. It was fun but even as far back as then it was very limited and no one wanted to watch my slideshows after seeing one. One is all you need to know you're done with that lol
I used to make music videos using Fantavision for the visuals on the Amiga then record the output to vhs through a Rokgen genlock before dubbing a soundtrack on afterwards. Fantavision could do a steady 50fps for a nice smooth PAL output and generated vector shapes that could be warped and animated. Using 2 vhs decks and compositing live video with Amiga graphics was loads of fun.
I didn't have a vhs deck with flying erase heads so to get a seamless edit you had to time the delay between pressing record and the heads engaging the tape with a stopwatch and listening for the sound the deck made. My Akai recording deck did have independent dual audio channels that could be dubbed onto whilst the video was playing which made the soundtrack easier to sync and layer with the visuals. Fun times and a bit of a lost art in these days of digital editing software.
You know it's a great day when he uploads
Never knew this was a thing! Great video!!!
Well.. In 2001... I used a CD burner to put all my pictures and a DVD player to read them all on a TV, but it wasn't that common yet I guess... My computer had a S-Video output also.
Instructions unclear, my TV now has Windows installed
Big Wave is a good album btw. Good choice MJD.
That's why I love thrift stores. You can find a lot of decent stuff just for a couple of bucks.
I see the Mountain Goats album cover you snuck into your image folder and I appreciate it.
MICHAEL MJD LISTENS TO THE MOUNTAIN GOATS??? absolutely insane, my favorite youtuber listens to one of my favorite bands
It would be cool if you took the CD and/or the demo diskette, and uploaded their contents to the web archive if they haven't been already!
Not sure if it's the same exact one as in the video, but there's one with the id microsofttvphotoviewersetupdisc1998 on there. It would be nice if the demo one was added though as well.
@@SmilerRyanYT The tour disk is included in that archive, so they're both already on there!
Yeah! MJD is back with another video.
At the beginning when you showed the device and the floppy which was to contain the images, I thought of all of the 35mm film I had processed through Seattle Film Works. After processing, they printed the images, scanned them to 3-1/2" disks, and included a CD with viewing software. This was intended for use on a PC, not the TV - but the images on disks were still pretty nifty at the time. BTW: I have a Mavica within my view as I type this.
Tbh Microsoft picture it express is so underrated. The way i got it was because it came with the cds of your photos when you got them developed at walmart (for my family at the time it was the 2004 version I'm pretty sure) and that's what I used to learn graphic design and photo editing as a kid lol. For what it is, its really easy to use and has a good amount of features. My mom and I even found a way for us to still use it with modern windows
Looks like something I'd expect to see on LGR.
I thought the same thing :)
loving the zopilote machine image :)
i actually thought i was hallucinating that. michael mjd knowing of the mountain goats was the last thing i expected lol
it's interesting that the TV Photo Viewer uses XP design language, while PictureIt! 2001 uses watercolor design language from Whistler.
A mechanic workshop I used to work at had one of these, was hardly ever used for many reasons.
But it was used as the boss had this dangerous dodgy weld xray machine that would spit out the "images" to floppy, he would then take them to his pc, convert them to jpeg then display on the tiny crt he had in the office.
Boss said, so not first hand knowledge, he brought it second hand off some shady guy in a van. Once he found out what it could do he saw so many uses for it.
His idea was check for cracks in engine blocks, transmissions, chassis etc.
What it was used for was the very rare chassis weld check, and that was only when we would get new mechanics come in and I think he wanted to show it off. We were all terrified of the thing, especially the warning labels he had rubbed off with a wire wheel.
Nice video, but I would have been interested on the data format stored on the floppy disk created by the proprietary software - i.e. if it's possible to retrieve at least the photos from the disk without the viewer device or software.
i wonder what CPU/MCU is in there
I would assume it's a zip file, perhaps an ini file inside for the slideshow settings and captions, but I also would like to know.
@@electrodeyt3491same
@@SmilerRyanYT I don't think it would be a zip, since JPEGs are already compressed
It just puts the image files directly onto the disk. This is why you can put a floppy disk directly from a Mavica into the Photo Viewer and it'll display them just fine.
I like the email option, your albums could do double duty as a nice tv slideshow and a conveniently sized file format for sharing with friends who live further away
I stopped using floppy disks sometime in 1998 when Windows install CD/DVDs became bootable. (NT4/98/ME/2000) Started building all my machines without floppy disks.
Holy crap, the floppy wall goes crazy
Without looking at the channel name. I thought this was an LGR Oddware video. Great video though. Interesting device.
I love how Michael says don't loose this remote when we won't ever have one in the first place 😂
Floppy on CRTs god this could have been a godsend in the 90's , I want to throw some low bitrate MP3 there
Michael really gave us a true nostalgic experience ✨️
I have memories from the late 90's of a computer lab teacher busting out a digital camera that saved to floppy disks, taking photos of our class, then pulling out the floppy and popping it into something like this to put on the class projector. I remember how excited she was to have this new toy to play with and I really wanted to play with it, myself, but was not allowed because it was the only one the school had and was probably very expensive. This would have been right about 1999, _maybe_ spring of 2000. I know for certain that it couldn't have been 2001, because I changed schools in the fall of 2000 and moved across the country in mid 2001. Perhaps this was a product that was given a trial run in the educational market? Or maybe my school just had a similar, but different product that was intended for enterprise and educational customers? I know these cameras had been around for a couple of years by this time, but it sounds like these direct photo readers were not around until floppy disk cameras (and floppies, themselves) were already becoming fairly obsolete.
It sounds like it couldn't have been this exact product because this product required you to use a PC and some software to format the disks for this thing, but perhaps it was something similar?
I could also very easily be misremembering, and maybe they just had the projector hooked up to a computer, but I am pretty certain that this isn't the case because I remember being completely blown away and fascinated by not just the camera, but also by how my teacher seamlessly popped it into a standalone little doohickey that made the photos she had just taken appear on the projector. I was already familiar with projectors being hooked up to computers from our computer lab classes (which is what the teacher used to demonstrate what she wanted us to do) so I doubt very much that I would have been very impressed with a projector plugged into a PC. The only other thing I can think it could be is that maybe the camera itself was plugged into the projector. Most camcorders and many early digital cameras at the time either had RCA out jacks or had split-out cables from their proprietary jacks that could be used to put up slide shows and play video direct to TV (or to output footage to VHS and/ or editing rigs)
I saw a Microsoft Fingerprint Reader at Goodwill the other day and thought it would make a great MJD video 😂
Do you mean the keyboard? I have one of those but can't get it to work because the drivers/software work ONLY with XP. 🤦 I tried finding a third-party fingerprint program, but just can't get it to work. 😕
No they made a separate USB fingerprint reader device. I never owned one, but this would have been the XP era for sure.@@I.____.....__...__
Can you look at pictures of Miku with it 🤔
no
Yeah. Assuming you can find a way to compress the picture to fit with a floppy disk.
@@GTAbestplayer123I guess low quality jpegs should work fine
I don’t see why not
You sure love Miku
Even if you wanted to view images on your TV back in 2001, you could just burn albums to a DVD and show them in a DVD player, which was far more common than the Microsoft TV floppy drive.
DVD burners weren't very common in 2001. The first version of DVD-RW didn't come out until 1999.
This is one of those devices that makes me wonder how Microsoft didn't end up being the first company to make a "Chromecast" or equivalent.
Uhm did you forget about media center?
@@easycompzeelandold2521 A whole-ass PC does not, a small multimedia device make.
Most digital cameras could connect to your TV no problem. This product is more for Grandma. Mail her floppy discs to view your pictures on her TV.
Thanks for the awesome video Michael! Quick question- did you get the chance to test the quality of the photos when you have 40 of them saved to the floppy disk, rather than 15? Just curious how much lower the quality is. If not though all good! Have a great week!
I guess JPGs with a native PAL or NTSC resolution (720x480 pixels in 4:3 mode) between 20 and 50 KB depending how many images you'd place.
@@AvWijk85or 576i here
I checked myself. Apparently the floppy disks made have a README.HTM file that sages images must be 640 x 480, and each image must be smaller than 120KB. Since the software apparently only supports 1.44 MB floppy disks, theorerically you could have up to 12 at the highest quality.
Once I added 20 pictures, it effectively warned me that the quality would be lowered and offered me to continue or cancel and make a second album.
After I get up to 40, it won't let me add any more, and saving that to disk, the leagest picture is 50kb, and it's using 1.33 MB (57.5 KB free) of the disk.
What an interesting piece of oddware! It especially would've made sense if you had an early digital camera with no screen, like a lot of cheaper models of the late '90s-early '00s.
But it would've been largely redundant for me, even if we'd grabbed one for cheap later. My family's* first digital camera -- a fairly basic 2000s Kodak, bought on closeout in 2003 -- _had_ a screen, and probably video out too. And my own Canon PowerShot A550 (bought in 2007) _very much_ has video out, via a tiny 2.5 mm barrel jack. I even plugged it into my grandma's TV a few times to show some pictures.
* actually Dad's; I borrowed it a lot
I'm pretty sure that the software create new images with the captions on them when you are writing the disc. That's why it cannot be toggled. But if the device can remember orientation, it mean it can write to the disc and thus changing the time setting would have been trivial to include (unless you need a new button or something)
The software does add text to the images themselves, not to an extra text file on disk (I checked myself in a Virtual Machine with a floppy drive).
MJD IS BACK BABYYYY!!!!
he was not gone
another thing I only found out bc of mjd, great vid, 420k followers lol
"who knew that the 3d printed save icon could be used to put images on a tv " ~someone in the futur i'm sure
Kind of off-topic but recently at a Goodwill I found a sealed set of installation discs for the version 1.0 PalmPilot.
That's pretty neat. As in, you found the software for connecting it to the computer? I recently found a Palm III at Goodwill for $2, it's missing the battery cover but it works
@@RocketWire oh, that’s neat!
Yeah, I got almost everything that was in the box except for the actual device and its charger. Given that it was a goodwill I’m guessing that they were unfortunately stolen. There was also some kind of weird female to male serial adapter thing, but it somehow disappeared between me grabbing it, and me putting my stuff on the checkout counter. Now I’m debating whether to open up the disks to see if they’re still readable or just to keep it sealed.
@@RocketWire the things I did get aside from the disks were the leather case, and a pamphlet that I’m guessing were like some sort of instruction manual for it.
This would work well for what we now call "digital signage" which is used in office buildings and shopping malls. Except now we do with USB flash drives plugged directly into the TV!
kinda made me remember about the time when i compressed spongebob's first eposide (help wanted) and typed it on a floppy disk. i wonder how it'll work on this since i still have that floppy
i cant become a member but you're cool so heres some money
I appreciate it, thanks so much!!
Unsure if this even released in Europe/Germany, I was still a young teen when this thing came out.
Still, I know I would have died to have this thing.
I love the viewsonic logo.
My nana and Pops actually had this and used it here and there to show photos
I don't know if it was ever done but this could have also been used for funerals. For the time this would have been one of the easiest ways to set up a slide show.
Just connected the camera to the tv back in the day. Also love for the consistency of the ui elements of both programs. Mayosoft just did an other version of mixing a bunch of different things together, partly 9x aka 2000 style elements and partly Luna theme. 😂
yo, Big Wave! I love that album
Floppy disks, especially 3.5" ones, were super ubiquitous, as evidenced by the fact that you can buy them new in box online as well as in massive stacks used.
14:50 I would imagine it burns captions into the image which is why the caption rotates as well as the image.
Here before this blows up!
It looks like it could have been paired eith the MSN TV box, or hell, the earlier WebTV box.
Sick video😊
Nice piece of history
Red alert 2 and Yuri's revenge picture, alongside half-life. That takes me back.
This feels like something businesses might have used more than anyone, it's a thing you can plug into a TV and have it roll around some advertisement slides, which you can easily swap in and out by changing a disc.
"Carl, it's September, can you load up the Christmas adverts floppy?"
This is cool! I would unironically use this often. I'll have to find one.
These videos are so good
1:16 Tatsuro Yamashita - Big Wave it's a really good album.
I would like to see what is inside of it and know whether it is actual microsoft software on it or just a rebranded product. It is probably some specialized chip, but it would be cool to retrofit it with linux or RTOS and play doom on it :P
Nice to know MJD is fan of Tatsuro Yamashita.
Wow, I had no idea this thing existed. I don't think I would've purchased this either, as I had a camera that plugged directly into the TV.
Most dad phrase ever.. Mine hooks right in
5:43 the space shuttle photo with texts look like youtube thumbnail somehow😂
That’s a pretty cool piece of tech. Never seen it before but damn sure wouldn’t have paid $160 for it originally. 😂
I just saw one of these this morning at a local thrift store. I passed as it was $12.
I also had an Iomega Zip Disk version someone gave me a couple months ago, but it was dead.
Right.. Ughh ehh naww.. See this Video.. Umm 🤔 🤔
Like yiy said, this is clearly an accessory for the Mavica.
3:56 "You were supposed to take that off" like most stickers on laptop and people STILL keep them even though they are disgracious and useless. I always remove them from my customer's computers. And if they "complain" (which they never do) I tell them that the cleaner that I use is just too powerful and ruined the sticker, and that it's supposed to stay when exposed on shelves and meant to be removed :)
0:23 As a Dankpods fan I approve of this
Microsoft was actively hostile to PNG in the early 2000s and their support for it was minimal. It was an open source format, and they still hated open source. Internet Explorer 6 didn't even support PNG transparency.
I think it was more because they were incompetent than hostile
I think the MSNTV 2 was a spiritual successor to this
GRANDMAS INTERNET
By 2001 I had a PlayStation2 modded and had all multimedia stuff on there, everything I ever needed. Basically it also had a photo feature where a DVD folder full of photos going on playback rotation or manual view. I took photos, if they were on USB then played them from there. If I burned them on a disc then it was played back from there.
So next to that, I see zero use in this device maybe if it came out 10 years prior then yeah I might had picked it up.