A fried alerted me to this video where you referenced my website where you got all the software versions from. Great to see this was still handy since my website will soon be disappearing after my retirement in February where my site is hosted. As I mentioned on my website, I was sent a prototype S-video attachment that plugs into the side slot, sent to me by an ex-Play employee. I used some of the info we exchanged in emails on my Snappy website.
I'm wondering if that S-video addon can be reverse engineered to make clones of. Sure it would probably only be for curiosity on how it could have worked, but could still be useful.
Since you know in advance the site will disappear at its current, work URL (understandable), you might consider manually checking if the Wayback Machine has captured all of it, maybe even manually archive any pages or files missing from the archive. If you have another, non-work webspace and are happy to keep hosting the content there yourself post-retirement (or know someone else who is), consider editing the site now, so the page points to or even redirects to the new URL, and then making sure that change is captured by the Wayback Machine too (assuming your employer is okay with that).
I used one of these in the late 90s to create a "virtual window" for my cubicle-bound co-workers. A headless 486 PC running Snappy with an old camcorder took a picture every minute and copied it to the file server, while a Visual Basic app running on individual desktops would copy it down and set the windows background to the image. People stuck in the middle of the building could "look out the window" to see what the weather was like... Great video! I definitely remember Snappy... I think one of the software "updates" came with a new battery cover. Sorry to hear of the sad ending to the company.
I've thought about something kinda similar. Many people live, and work, in windowless environments. Screens are thin enough you could easily put one in a fake window frame and mount it to a wall. Put speakers in the frame and have the volume controlled by the opening and closing of the window. Using this you could then create a window to any location, real or otherwise.
@@CaliMeatWagon A couple of people on UA-cam have done that. But like the... hot anime babe... says, I can imagine it just driving you nuts. If you did it with a big window, you'd notice that as you walked past it, looked at it from different angles, the view was still the same, flat. With a window, you can look in different directions and see different things. It'd work as a small "window", or a larger one at a distance. Maybe for your nuclear shelter or something. Put some sky above your artificial beach. It'd just need to be far away enough that the view would be limited, were it a real window. The further you are from a real window, the less your viewing it from different angles affects the view. But yeah, people get fatigue looking at screens. Great big ones the size of a wall would annoy the piss out of you. It's like they're slightly burning your eyes or your brain or something. There are health and safety regulations telling computer operators to take a break every 15 minutes and look out of a window, or something distant, just to re-focus your eyes and give them some exercise. Otherwise you end up short-sighted. It's possible to do great big walls using displays that specially have very thin borders. I bet you could get screens with almost no border to fit together, there's no reason an LCD or OLED needs a border at the edge. Often that's where the electronics connect to the panel, along the edges, but that only needs like a millimeter. And with chip-on-glass, you can have, well, a chip, in the LCD's glass, to generate the picture and communicate with it's control computer through connections somewhere else. But still, I think it would just look horrible. People now have TV screens in their living rooms that are far too big, too large for the distance you're viewing them from, IE how far your couch is from the wall with the TV on it. You can't comfortably see the whole screen any more. People are dazzled by them so they buy them, but they're not a great idea. Also windowless environments are terrible! Architects should be made to answer for their crimes! People need real windows with views and sunlight. Otherwise it's like being in a cross between a casino and a tin can, no idea where you are, no sense of space or time. Uprooted, disorientated. Nightmarish. Money-grubbing bastards! Can you imagine working on the 70th floor of a skyscraper, and the view out all the windows is other skyscrapers? Madness! No wonder those windows don't open, it'd be raining stockbrokers.
Back when the Snappy came out, our school produced student IDs by using a Panasonic S-VHS camcorder's freeze function to take the "photos", which were then captured by the Snappy and touched up for printing. They did it this way as a cost saving measure, as you could fit many hundreds of student photos on a single S-VHS tape.
The 1990's were the golden age of PC peripherals. A lot of them over-promised and some were downright wacky. Now they've all been replaced by phone apps. One of the thrift stores I used to visit was a graveyard for all this stuff and ancient boxed software. Great video! I was hoping they're be one released over the holidays.
I remember going to the mall to a shareware store, buying a few 3.5" floppy disks on the cheap. If you liked it you could pay the creator for the full version. Don't like apps, it is evaporware. You don't have access to the software if it disappears off of the server, or the if your operating system is updated it no longer works. Yet, you paid for it......
Definitely this is the proof that limitations often improve creativity and imagination. It also has the option of letting you choose the frame that you look better from all of them.
I worked at Play and it was great to see this blast from the past. I didn't work in the Snappy department, I worked in the Trinity side of the business but I loved going back to Snappy tech support and hanging out with the techs. Humorously one of those techs ended up owning the whole company and I still sell their paintbox software today as a telestrator.
This is really interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what video game magazines from the 90s used to get a lot of the screenshots they featured.
I was working at Best Buy right when these came out. Store management was super excited about it. That fall, I enrolled in journalism school and they were excited about it too, but more for what they thought the followup might be. I wrote a paper for my New Media class on video capture with a Snappy, more as a proof of concept than anything. Video at 28.8 wasn't practical, but I speculated by the time PCs were fast enough to make video capture practical, Internet speeds might not be far behind so things could line up in a way for it to be a viable delivery mechanism for video. Snappy was a trailblazer, and it showed the way to the future we theorized was possible in 1995. I agree it's a shame it's so forgotten today.
I loved my Snappy. I had hours of fun and digitized hundreds of stills from VHS video tape. I have a directory in my archives called Snappy Pics. The product worked perfectly and to this day I have a soft spot in my heart for the Snappy. Thanks for doing this video... great job documenting the Snappy.
I remember helping a friend of my dad set up that exact same computer including a 10base2 lantastic card. The lady that was to use it was such a “pro” at word perfect macros she looked at the mouse and said what’s this! And threw it behind the pc!
I loved my Snappy. I used it to grab shots from movies and used them in band flyers and mid-90s era fansites. Thanks for the quarter-century-old computer memories!
Haven't heard of this thing before. This is a really innovative product that's way ahead of it's time. Mostly limited by LPT bus, this would have worked much better with USB. But then again, USB wasn't even invented when this was released.
Once USB got big, this device kinda became obsolete... it was a niche device for a kinda niche market. It was during a time when not everyone had a PC nor everyone thought of sending photos or using them on the PC. PCs were used mostly for documents or surfing the web or playing web games... and once adding photos to the PC became mainstream, this was already an obsolete device because USB allowed you to just transfer over photos...
Snappy, I ever used this mainly to take picture from my VHS cam. TO Solve the issue of space on printer port, i plugged my Snappy to an paralal port extesion pin to pin. cable.
I never used this technology back in the day. But looks pretty cool and works as advertised given the tech limits mid 90's. Good video and very detailed walk through.
I had a similar product, it had a printer pass thru and no battery needed. This launched me as an ebay seller in 1997 with my sony camcorder, a tripod and some desk lights. I sold hundreds of products. I had to fto ro my isp member storage use html tags in my listings to show pictures and i did midi files for background music. You had to be a geek. Yes my hardware ran windows 95 and 98. The pictures amazed people.
I remember seeing the Snappy being debuted at Comdex Atlanta 1995. The Snappy was easily the highlight of the entire conference. Crowds would gather around 10 deep to watch the presentations. I think some of that may have been because Kiki presented while wearing a very, very short skirt.
The "Vido Toaster" connection runs deeper than just Kiki. PLAY was founded by a group that had left NewTek in a spat with Tim Jenison-inluding Brad Carvey (Dana's older brother) who had designed the Toaster and likely this bit of kit.
I had a Snappy. It's probably still in a box in my basement somewhere with other old computer stuff. I remember it worked very well for the time. I could point my handycam (from Radio shack) 8mm camcorder at anything and take pics or connect my VCR to grab images.
I purchased one of these in the mid 90's. I was impressed by how fun and funny the manual was. I don't remember any specifics, but it gave the impression of people who loved what they did and had good senses of humor.
Its my understanding that this was the method by which you got digital photos in 1992. A four head VCR, a camcorder, and something like this. Pretty neat.
I had one of these and also a computer eyes board back in the day too! kiki handed me the snappy and then met her a second time when meeting with newtek getting my video toaster nt / framefactory board had the vtnt up to version 5 when it was eventually discontinued ... the vtnt 5 still works today ..along with the sx8 breakout box (it survived a basement flood even! ) ..and the rs8 switcher! - good times!
That version 3 software is so delightfully late 90s/early 2000s, I love that era of design. This thing seems quite functional, I can see why it was so successful. With a Laserdisc setup this would have been pretty excellent for grabbing HQ frames from movies and such.
The "taking mutliple shots of the same scene and combining them into one picture to mitigate sensor-bleh" is really nice. I think modern phone cameras do the same but so quick that you don't notice the multiple shots being taken.
Yes the snappy was how I took pictures for ebay items back in 1995, in the first year of ebay. I had a hosting site for them that could hold about 100 low res pictures for said items. I used that snappy up until I got my first digital camera.
I had a Snappy, used it for creating eBay photos with the aid of an (even then) ancient VHS JVC camcorder... The alternative for me was scanning Polaroid photos or 35mm prints, both of which were costly. That method was used until I purchased a Fujifilm DX-10 digital still camera in 1998. I think I may still have the Snappy buried somewhere in the garage!
You figured out how to get your money's worth out of that thing! Takes me back to 1997 when I used a powermac 8500/120 to grab a pic of a lightning strike I caught on video. Native hardware but video capture was a bad joke. I must have smashed the 'capture' button 100 times while running the tape in real time to get it but it worked. Turned out the lightning really did hit Sutro tower! oh, and de-interlacing was done in photoshop 4.0, FYI.
By the early 2000's USB and DV capture devices can capture full resolution SD video @ 30/25 fps with decent MPEG-2 or DV compression, So the writing was already on the wall for the Snappy, It was a cool gadget in its time nevertheless.
I love watching videos of late 90s tech, it's fascinating to me. All the things we take for granted now...for a screenshot lol it's so cool to me. Snappy is a great name too 📼
Mannn the late 90's/early 00's were a great time for PC components. I remember getting one of these and a 5in bay equalizer mod for my birthday one year😂
“Sorry for the moire pattern. I’ll have a word with my camera operator about it.” Hahaha that was hilarious. I can picture him in the mirror saying “come on, we can do better than this!”
Nice shout out to Fran Blanche (Franlab)! Also, wow, these photos for what hardware's being used, is of quite good quality for the times. Yeah, scanners and all could do a bit better with photographic paper, yet, this has that, well, retro feel.
The switch box was another thing I had I had an SCSI cable that used printer port I eventually put in a dedicated SCSI card Symbios I think I had a 9 GB SCSI disk, 20 inches by 16 inches by 10 inches and weighed 40 pounds. I had a flatbed scanner and I had something else that was SCSI but I don't remember what the third device was. Really amazing what we can do today.
A few years ago I found an old fanzine at a used bookstore that had a bunch of stills from VHS that looked exactly like your examples - I wonder if this is what the authors used to capture the images. And no, I (stupidly) didn't buy it as it was a bit expensive.
There's been any number of devices, TV tuners as well. With an adequately designed frontend, which most of them were back in the day when they cost something resembling actual money, they'll grab stills from VHS at the same quality. I still have some here. Compared to today's poor excuses for composite capture devices that you can grab for a couple $, a world of difference.
OMG! I actually forgot about this. I had one when they were selling really cheap around 2001. I used to grab anime images off of VHS tapes with it, and had a crappy website where I reviewed them! LOL! I feel so old now!
Snappy Video Snapshot was a video capture card for personal computers in the 1990s. It allowed users to capture still frames or video clips from an analog video source, such as a VHS tape, and save them in a digital format on the computer's hard drive. The card was an add-on for desktop PCs and required a compatible system to function. The specific requirements for a system to be compatible with the Snappy Video Snapshot card would depend on the model of the card, but in general, a compatible system would need to meet the following minimum requirements: A desktop PC with an ISA or PCI expansion slot An operating system such as Windows 95/98 or MS-DOS A VGA graphics card with VESA support A CD-ROM drive for software installation A sound card for audio recording (optional) Enough hard disk space to store captured video and still images It's worth noting that these requirements are just a rough guideline, and the exact specifications for compatibility would depend on the specific model of the Snappy Video Snapshot card and the software it came with. Snappy Video Snapshot is not widely known or remembered today, as it was a niche product from a specific era of personal computing. With the advancement of technology and the widespread availability of digital video capture and editing tools, video capture cards like Snappy Video Snapshot have become obsolete. The vast majority of modern computers have integrated video capture and editing capabilities, and there are also many affordable and user-friendly software options available. As a result, there is less of a need for dedicated hardware like the Snappy Video Snapshot card, and it has fallen out of use and popular memory. The widespread availability of integrated video capture and editing capabilities in modern computers has largely replaced the need for dedicated hardware such as the Snappy Video Snapshot card. Advances in technology have led to the integration of video capture and editing functionality into most computers and laptops, making it easier and more convenient for users to capture, edit, and share digital video content. This has reduced the demand for add-on hardware like the Snappy Video Snapshot card, which has become obsolete as a result.
My bud has 2 of these. Useless now unless you have a vintage machine with a parallel port. I have some dvd's he made using captured images off air. Almost look like factory made. I told him to put 'em on ebay. Probably somebody will buy 'em. If people are still paying $2495 for old IMSAI's, these should sell, LOL. Great video. Thanks. I forgot about these.
They claimed to have US$25 million of sales in the first year Snappy was on the market. So they probably sold hundreds of thousands of units over the Snappy's lifespan.
To be honest, I'm quite impressed with the quality. It wasn't until I got my first All-In-Wonder ATI card that I had any way to get snapshot's from a video source. I am a bit confused by the highest resolution option, as it above NTSC video's. Does this actually provide a noticeable improvement?
Never seen a parallel port video frame grabber before! Funny enough, I had come across a video frame grabber nubus card, thinking it was a quicktime video capture card which I thought would be useful for my Power Computing Power 120. At least I got my ROI when I sold the card.
Item photos for my earliest internet classified listings were done from my parent's Sony Hi8 Camcorder and a Snappy. Would've been in about '96. I had completely forgotten about it until seeing this. Quality was *terrible* compared to the amazing Apple digital cameras we had in school, but way better than nothing. It was replaced with a WinTV, then a Mavica.
Blast from the past, I think we had the 1st one? Every once in a while I run across it, Yup Still have it; Oh crap wonder if I took the battery out? LOL It would be fun to run that on a modern computer guess one would have to get an expansion parallel port these days ; Heck I bet I have one of those as well. What I really need to find is a working 5.25 floppy drive . That's one thing I never held on to. Great Video!!! Thanks.
Using a scanner was the best way to do it back then considering the scanner was also a tool for other stuff. My family did have one of these devices for the camcorder but the picture quality was only so good. Their was an other tool for doing video too.
I feel like I might have seen this on sale when I was a teenager here in Australia. Never owned one, nor had any reason to own one, but it seems vaguely familiar.
(I watched the video on my other channel [Haji2nd]) I'm surprised that such an old capture device can capture such high-quality (or even Okay quality) images! Pretty sad that the company owner died in 1999.
OMG! (as the kids say) What's the chance that I had the SAME CAMCORDER at the time?!? Sharp must have sold a million of those! My PC then was an IBM PS/1 (2155) though.
Yes, when NewTek insisted on sticking with the Amiga platform even after Commodore's bankruptcy, Paul Montgomery, Kiki Stockhammer, and a few other NewTek employees left the company and joined Play, Inc.
In 1994 the former Newtek/Video Toaster people, along with people from a Sacramento, California, hardware creation and manufacturing company called Progressive Image Technology, and people from a software creation and marketing company called Digital Creations got together and formed PLAY, Inc. The companies Progressive Image Technology and Digital Creations had worked together for several years in the Sacramento area. PIT created and made hardware and DC created the software and marketed several products together like SuperGen™(a genlock used by many cable program guides) and The Kitchen Sync (a dual TBC [time base corrector]). I know. I was in the room where it happened. I was a former employee of Digital Creation before the formation of PLAY, Inc.
Wouldn't the highest resolution still be approx NTSC resolution? Averaging the second frame may improve the noise for the same lines in frame one, but not create new lines. Unless we are talking horizontal resolution.... I guess I can see how you could effectively sample each analog line with more dots with the advantage of temporal averaging.
A friend told me about one place selling a Snappy device and I got mine for only $13 Brand New! It worked Great on Windows 95 and I still have it. I should see if it will work on Win98SE.
In Europe I only remember seeing the logo but nobody really used that. There were TV cards that could do the same but real time because of PCI bandwidth. I once hooked up a VCR and digitized some minutes before I ran out of my meager hard drive space gave up on the idea.
What parallel port modes were you using? The old Windows 3.1 box I'd bet was simple bi-directional with 4 bit input. Does the Snappy support Enhanced Parallel port (8 bit input) and Enhanced Capability Port (8 bit input with DMA) modes? Bi-directional mode was 'always there' but it took a software hack to make use of it. Someone figured out that any LPT port that was made to the specifications IBM used could have software read the four status lines as generic data inputs. Using the normal 8 bit data output, software could command a peripheral to split bytes to nybbles and rapidly toggle them to the status lines. Software running on the PC would monitor the status lines and recombine the nybbles into bytes. I first read about this hack in a computer magazine in the early 90's. ISTR it was PC Magazine, might have been another one because I'm not certain if PC Magazine was much for hacking and modifying articles. It didn't take very long for Bi-Directional LPT to become an officially supported mode.
I always laugh at these products that advertised "$$$$100s of free software included!" because the "JimBob's PaintWerkx Deluxe Pro Studio Edition" included graphics editor had an MSRP of $299, when no one ever paid more than $5 for the Shareware version!
I think I remember seeing something like this at our local thrift store (or atleast something with similar packaging), just sitting there for months if not over a year. I don't have any use for one, but I wish i would have taken a photo of it to see if the Snappy was what I saw. (also this is probably the only time ill get first comment so...)
i have one on a shelf some one gave me once .. havent tried it .. dont know if i have software. Looks like i once downloaded a 3.0 CD image called snappy.
A fried alerted me to this video where you referenced my website where you got all the software versions from. Great to see this was still handy since my website will soon be disappearing after my retirement in February where my site is hosted. As I mentioned on my website, I was sent a prototype S-video attachment that plugs into the side slot, sent to me by an ex-Play employee. I used some of the info we exchanged in emails on my Snappy website.
I'm wondering if that S-video addon can be reverse engineered to make clones of. Sure it would probably only be for curiosity on how it could have worked, but could still be useful.
Could you maybe archive the site, so it's up on the Internet archive for people in the future to make use of? Would be shame to see it go.
@@teh_supar_hackr Actually, AliExpress is full of clones for this, even modernized to connect over USB instead LPT.
Since you know in advance the site will disappear at its current, work URL (understandable), you might consider manually checking if the Wayback Machine has captured all of it, maybe even manually archive any pages or files missing from the archive. If you have another, non-work webspace and are happy to keep hosting the content there yourself post-retirement (or know someone else who is), consider editing the site now, so the page points to or even redirects to the new URL, and then making sure that change is captured by the Wayback Machine too (assuming your employer is okay with that).
@@ropersonline great idea!
I used one of these in the late 90s to create a "virtual window" for my cubicle-bound co-workers. A headless 486 PC running Snappy with an old camcorder took a picture every minute and copied it to the file server, while a Visual Basic app running on individual desktops would copy it down and set the windows background to the image. People stuck in the middle of the building could "look out the window" to see what the weather was like... Great video! I definitely remember Snappy... I think one of the software "updates" came with a new battery cover. Sorry to hear of the sad ending to the company.
This sound so damn smart. I wish I could get the same thing at work.
I've thought about something kinda similar.
Many people live, and work, in windowless environments.
Screens are thin enough you could easily put one in a fake window frame and mount it to a wall. Put speakers in the frame and have the volume controlled by the opening and closing of the window.
Using this you could then create a window to any location, real or otherwise.
@@CaliMeatWagon A couple of people on UA-cam have done that. But like the... hot anime babe... says, I can imagine it just driving you nuts. If you did it with a big window, you'd notice that as you walked past it, looked at it from different angles, the view was still the same, flat. With a window, you can look in different directions and see different things.
It'd work as a small "window", or a larger one at a distance. Maybe for your nuclear shelter or something. Put some sky above your artificial beach. It'd just need to be far away enough that the view would be limited, were it a real window. The further you are from a real window, the less your viewing it from different angles affects the view.
But yeah, people get fatigue looking at screens. Great big ones the size of a wall would annoy the piss out of you. It's like they're slightly burning your eyes or your brain or something. There are health and safety regulations telling computer operators to take a break every 15 minutes and look out of a window, or something distant, just to re-focus your eyes and give them some exercise. Otherwise you end up short-sighted.
It's possible to do great big walls using displays that specially have very thin borders. I bet you could get screens with almost no border to fit together, there's no reason an LCD or OLED needs a border at the edge. Often that's where the electronics connect to the panel, along the edges, but that only needs like a millimeter. And with chip-on-glass, you can have, well, a chip, in the LCD's glass, to generate the picture and communicate with it's control computer through connections somewhere else. But still, I think it would just look horrible.
People now have TV screens in their living rooms that are far too big, too large for the distance you're viewing them from, IE how far your couch is from the wall with the TV on it. You can't comfortably see the whole screen any more. People are dazzled by them so they buy them, but they're not a great idea.
Also windowless environments are terrible! Architects should be made to answer for their crimes! People need real windows with views and sunlight. Otherwise it's like being in a cross between a casino and a tin can, no idea where you are, no sense of space or time. Uprooted, disorientated. Nightmarish. Money-grubbing bastards! Can you imagine working on the 70th floor of a skyscraper, and the view out all the windows is other skyscrapers? Madness! No wonder those windows don't open, it'd be raining stockbrokers.
@HotAnimeBabe99541 not me I’m built different
😄
Back when the Snappy came out, our school produced student IDs by using a Panasonic S-VHS camcorder's freeze function to take the "photos", which were then captured by the Snappy and touched up for printing. They did it this way as a cost saving measure, as you could fit many hundreds of student photos on a single S-VHS tape.
Ok 👍
Genius move actually
price club did similar for their membership photos
The 1990's were the golden age of PC peripherals. A lot of them over-promised and some were downright wacky. Now they've all been replaced by phone apps.
One of the thrift stores I used to visit was a graveyard for all this stuff and ancient boxed software.
Great video! I was hoping they're be one released over the holidays.
No boxed software is a tragedy for the consumer.
I remember going to the mall to a shareware store, buying a few 3.5" floppy disks on the cheap. If you liked it you could pay the creator for the full version. Don't like apps, it is evaporware.
You don't have access to the software if it disappears off of the server, or the if your operating system is updated it no longer works. Yet, you paid for it......
1990s Tech was the Best! ( I LUV THE NAME SNAPPY!)
@@Gorilla_Jones no it’s not. It’s the most libertarian software
@@wolfetteplays8894 Pirates are not consumers.
Definitely this is the proof that limitations often improve creativity and imagination. It also has the option of letting you choose the frame that you look better from all of them.
I worked at Play and it was great to see this blast from the past. I didn't work in the Snappy department, I worked in the Trinity side of the business but I loved going back to Snappy tech support and hanging out with the techs. Humorously one of those techs ended up owning the whole company and I still sell their paintbox software today as a telestrator.
This is really interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what video game magazines from the 90s used to get a lot of the screenshots they featured.
I was working at Best Buy right when these came out. Store management was super excited about it. That fall, I enrolled in journalism school and they were excited about it too, but more for what they thought the followup might be. I wrote a paper for my New Media class on video capture with a Snappy, more as a proof of concept than anything. Video at 28.8 wasn't practical, but I speculated by the time PCs were fast enough to make video capture practical, Internet speeds might not be far behind so things could line up in a way for it to be a viable delivery mechanism for video. Snappy was a trailblazer, and it showed the way to the future we theorized was possible in 1995. I agree it's a shame it's so forgotten today.
I loved my Snappy. I had hours of fun and digitized hundreds of stills from VHS video tape. I have a directory in my archives called Snappy Pics. The product worked perfectly and to this day I have a soft spot in my heart for the Snappy. Thanks for doing this video... great job documenting the Snappy.
14:51 I love this Techmoan reference!
That Netscape navigator screenshot takes me back to my childhood/jr high years
I remember helping a friend of my dad set up that exact same computer including a 10base2 lantastic card. The lady that was to use it was such a “pro” at word perfect macros she looked at the mouse and said what’s this! And threw it behind the pc!
That Netscape screenshot (0:05) brought back so many memories! #nostalgia
I loved my Snappy. I used it to grab shots from movies and used them in band flyers and mid-90s era fansites. Thanks for the quarter-century-old computer memories!
Haven't heard of this thing before. This is a really innovative product that's way ahead of it's time. Mostly limited by LPT bus, this would have worked much better with USB. But then again, USB wasn't even invented when this was released.
Once USB got big, this device kinda became obsolete... it was a niche device for a kinda niche market. It was during a time when not everyone had a PC nor everyone thought of sending photos or using them on the PC.
PCs were used mostly for documents or surfing the web or playing web games... and once adding photos to the PC became mainstream, this was already an obsolete device because USB allowed you to just transfer over photos...
How does the LPT port limit? The LPT port is a bi-directional 8 bit port. Even an 8 bit port will not limit any data transfer
Snappy, I ever used this mainly to take picture from my VHS cam. TO Solve the issue of space on printer port, i plugged my Snappy to an paralal port extesion pin to pin. cable.
Sonique looking interface with that software. Wow!
I never used this technology back in the day. But looks pretty cool and works as advertised given the tech limits mid 90's. Good video and very detailed walk through.
This channel is so awesome, I love learning about random historical tech :D
noway. i literally wanted this for vhs editing skateboards. except i had the tv tuner already installed and didnt know these existed.
I had a similar product, it had a printer pass thru and no battery needed. This launched me as an ebay seller in 1997 with my sony camcorder, a tripod and some desk lights. I sold hundreds of products. I had to fto ro my isp member storage use html tags in my listings to show pictures and i did midi files for background music. You had to be a geek. Yes my hardware ran windows 95 and 98. The pictures amazed people.
Holy crap! I remember seeing this at a Goodwill and not knowing what it was. Nice to finally find out.
Great video.
Kiki Stockhammer…now that’s a name I've not heard in a long time.
I remember seeing the Snappy being debuted at Comdex Atlanta 1995. The Snappy was easily the highlight of the entire conference. Crowds would gather around 10 deep to watch the presentations. I think some of that may have been because Kiki presented while wearing a very, very short skirt.
I had a Snappy v2.0 - in fact I still have it somewhere. I loved it to bits at the time!
I bet game journalists were extremely happy to have this device at the time to capture screenshots
The "Vido Toaster" connection runs deeper than just Kiki. PLAY was founded by a group that had left NewTek in a spat with Tim Jenison-inluding Brad Carvey (Dana's older brother) who had designed the Toaster and likely this bit of kit.
I had a Snappy. It's probably still in a box in my basement somewhere with other old computer stuff. I remember it worked very well for the time. I could point my handycam (from Radio shack) 8mm camcorder at anything and take pics or connect my VCR to grab images.
I purchased one of these in the mid 90's. I was impressed by how fun and funny the manual was. I don't remember any specifics, but it gave the impression of people who loved what they did and had good senses of humor.
Thanks for the video, Kevin.
Its my understanding that this was the method by which you got digital photos in 1992. A four head VCR, a camcorder, and something like this. Pretty neat.
I had one of these and also a computer eyes board back in the day too! kiki handed me the snappy and then met her a second time when meeting with newtek getting my video toaster nt / framefactory board had the vtnt up to version 5 when it was eventually discontinued ... the vtnt 5 still works today ..along with the sx8 breakout box (it survived a basement flood even! ) ..and the rs8 switcher! - good times!
The music is stellar! My head was nodding to the tunes lol
That version 3 software is so delightfully late 90s/early 2000s, I love that era of design. This thing seems quite functional, I can see why it was so successful.
With a Laserdisc setup this would have been pretty excellent for grabbing HQ frames from movies and such.
The "taking mutliple shots of the same scene and combining them into one picture to mitigate sensor-bleh" is really nice. I think modern phone cameras do the same but so quick that you don't notice the multiple shots being taken.
Yes the snappy was how I took pictures for ebay items back in 1995, in the first year of ebay. I had a hosting site for them that could hold about 100 low res pictures for said items. I used that snappy up until I got my first digital camera.
I had a Snappy, used it for creating eBay photos with the aid of an (even then) ancient VHS JVC camcorder... The alternative for me was scanning Polaroid photos or 35mm prints, both of which were costly. That method was used until I purchased a Fujifilm DX-10 digital still camera in 1998. I think I may still have the Snappy buried somewhere in the garage!
If you've ever seen the listing from Canadian eBay seller "wiredforservice", I think he uses one of these even today!
You figured out how to get your money's worth out of that thing! Takes me back to 1997 when I used a powermac 8500/120 to grab a pic of a lightning strike I caught on video. Native hardware but video capture was a bad joke. I must have smashed the 'capture' button 100 times while running the tape in real time to get it but it worked. Turned out the lightning really did hit Sutro tower! oh, and de-interlacing was done in photoshop 4.0, FYI.
By the early 2000's USB and DV capture devices can capture full resolution SD video @ 30/25 fps with decent MPEG-2 or DV compression, So the writing was already on the wall for the Snappy, It was a cool gadget in its time nevertheless.
We had one! Parallel port accessories ftw!
I love watching videos of late 90s tech, it's fascinating to me. All the things we take for granted now...for a screenshot lol it's so cool to me.
Snappy is a great name too 📼
Mannn the late 90's/early 00's were a great time for PC components. I remember getting one of these and a 5in bay equalizer mod for my birthday one year😂
wow! What a time to be alive.. You can afford a camcorder AND a trip to Disney?! Now we just have to pick between food and shelter.
“Sorry for the moire pattern. I’ll have a word with my camera operator about it.” Hahaha that was hilarious. I can picture him in the mirror saying “come on, we can do better than this!”
Nice shout out to Fran Blanche (Franlab)!
Also, wow, these photos for what hardware's being used, is of quite good quality for the times.
Yeah, scanners and all could do a bit better with photographic paper, yet, this has that, well, retro feel.
Never heard of it, but now I want one!
The power of the parallel port in the palm of my hand.
The switch box was another thing I had
I had an SCSI cable that used printer port
I eventually put in a dedicated SCSI card Symbios I think
I had a 9 GB SCSI disk, 20 inches by 16 inches by 10 inches and weighed 40 pounds.
I had a flatbed scanner and I had something else that was SCSI but I don't remember what the third device was.
Really amazing what we can do today.
I remember this ad for the Snappy with the redhead lady in my mid-1990s computer magazines.
Happy new year to you and all your channel supporters 🎉
Thank you for this informative and interesting video.
A few years ago I found an old fanzine at a used bookstore that had a bunch of stills from VHS that looked exactly like your examples - I wonder if this is what the authors used to capture the images. And no, I (stupidly) didn't buy it as it was a bit expensive.
There's been any number of devices, TV tuners as well. With an adequately designed frontend, which most of them were back in the day when they cost something resembling actual money, they'll grab stills from VHS at the same quality. I still have some here. Compared to today's poor excuses for composite capture devices that you can grab for a couple $, a world of difference.
love the lens flare!
istg, 80s and 90s have the most interesting sruff
My brother and I used snappy to make stop-motion videos and the included Gryphon Morph 2.5 software was awesome too.
omg those 90s pc menus , I thought they were the greatest as a kit 9:40
OMG! I actually forgot about this. I had one when they were selling really cheap around 2001. I used to grab anime images off of VHS tapes with it, and had a crappy website where I reviewed them!
LOL!
I feel so old now!
Snappy Video Snapshot was a video capture card for personal computers in the 1990s. It allowed users to capture still frames or video clips from an analog video source, such as a VHS tape, and save them in a digital format on the computer's hard drive. The card was an add-on for desktop PCs and required a compatible system to function.
The specific requirements for a system to be compatible with the Snappy Video Snapshot card would depend on the model of the card, but in general, a compatible system would need to meet the following minimum requirements:
A desktop PC with an ISA or PCI expansion slot
An operating system such as Windows 95/98 or MS-DOS
A VGA graphics card with VESA support
A CD-ROM drive for software installation
A sound card for audio recording (optional)
Enough hard disk space to store captured video and still images
It's worth noting that these requirements are just a rough guideline, and the exact specifications for compatibility would depend on the specific model of the Snappy Video Snapshot card and the software it came with.
Snappy Video Snapshot is not widely known or remembered today, as it was a niche product from a specific era of personal computing. With the advancement of technology and the widespread availability of digital video capture and editing tools, video capture cards like Snappy Video Snapshot have become obsolete. The vast majority of modern computers have integrated video capture and editing capabilities, and there are also many affordable and user-friendly software options available. As a result, there is less of a need for dedicated hardware like the Snappy Video Snapshot card, and it has fallen out of use and popular memory.
The widespread availability of integrated video capture and editing capabilities in modern computers has largely replaced the need for dedicated hardware such as the Snappy Video Snapshot card. Advances in technology have led to the integration of video capture and editing functionality into most computers and laptops, making it easier and more convenient for users to capture, edit, and share digital video content. This has reduced the demand for add-on hardware like the Snappy Video Snapshot card, which has become obsolete as a result.
I used to have a Snappy. I used mine during highschool around 2011/2012 with my ol toshiba.
My bud has 2 of these. Useless now unless you have a vintage machine with a parallel port. I have some dvd's he made using captured images off air. Almost look like factory made. I told him to put 'em on ebay. Probably somebody will buy 'em. If people are still paying $2495 for old IMSAI's, these should sell, LOL.
Great video. Thanks. I forgot about these.
I had a Snappy! It was pretty awesome at the time!
Hopefully you've uploaded all of those disks on the internet archive :D
my dad had this and he LOVED it!
Yours is SN 475 1522. The one I have is SN 016 8918. I wonder how many of these were produced ?
They claimed to have US$25 million of sales in the first year Snappy was on the market. So they probably sold hundreds of thousands of units over the Snappy's lifespan.
To be honest, I'm quite impressed with the quality. It wasn't until I got my first All-In-Wonder ATI card that I had any way to get snapshot's from a video source. I am a bit confused by the highest resolution option, as it above NTSC video's. Does this actually provide a noticeable improvement?
Never seen a parallel port video frame grabber before!
Funny enough, I had come across a video frame grabber nubus card, thinking it was a quicktime video capture card which I thought would be useful for my Power Computing Power 120. At least I got my ROI when I sold the card.
Item photos for my earliest internet classified listings were done from my parent's Sony Hi8 Camcorder and a Snappy. Would've been in about '96. I had completely forgotten about it until seeing this. Quality was *terrible* compared to the amazing Apple digital cameras we had in school, but way better than nothing. It was replaced with a WinTV, then a Mavica.
Thank you for the upload! 🙂
Blast from the past, I think we had the 1st one? Every once in a while I run across it,
Yup Still have it; Oh crap wonder if I took the battery out? LOL
It would be fun to run that on a modern computer guess one would have to get an expansion parallel port these days ; Heck I bet I have one of those as well.
What I really need to find is a working 5.25 floppy drive . That's one thing I never held on to.
Great Video!!! Thanks.
5:20 And for those of you that don't know Kiki is a member of a Star Trek rock band named Warp 11.
Using a scanner was the best way to do it back then considering the scanner was also a tool for other stuff. My family did have one of these devices for the camcorder but the picture quality was only so good. Their was an other tool for doing video too.
Still quality of interlaced composite video signal was awful
The Queer as Folk clip got me.
I feel like I might have seen this on sale when I was a teenager here in Australia. Never owned one, nor had any reason to own one, but it seems vaguely familiar.
(I watched the video on my other channel [Haji2nd]) I'm surprised that such an old capture device can capture such high-quality (or even Okay quality) images! Pretty sad that the company owner died in 1999.
OMG! (as the kids say) What's the chance that I had the SAME CAMCORDER at the time?!? Sharp must have sold a million of those! My PC then was an IBM PS/1 (2155) though.
Wasn't Play Inc. set up by former Newtek/Video Toaster people?
Yes, when NewTek insisted on sticking with the Amiga platform even after Commodore's bankruptcy, Paul Montgomery, Kiki Stockhammer, and a few other NewTek employees left the company and joined Play, Inc.
Yes. Kiki went back to Newtek after Play folded.
In 1994 the former Newtek/Video Toaster people, along with people from a Sacramento, California, hardware creation and manufacturing company called Progressive Image Technology, and people from a software creation and marketing company called Digital Creations got together and formed PLAY, Inc.
The companies Progressive Image Technology and Digital Creations had worked together for several years in the Sacramento area. PIT created and made hardware and DC created the software and marketed several products together like SuperGen™(a genlock used by many cable program guides) and The Kitchen Sync (a dual TBC [time base corrector]).
I know. I was in the room where it happened. I was a former employee of Digital Creation before the formation of PLAY, Inc.
Wouldn't the highest resolution still be approx NTSC resolution? Averaging the second frame may improve the noise for the same lines in frame one, but not create new lines. Unless we are talking horizontal resolution.... I guess I can see how you could effectively sample each analog line with more dots with the advantage of temporal averaging.
A friend told me about one place selling a Snappy device and I got mine for only $13 Brand New! It worked Great on Windows 95 and I still have it. I should see if it will work on Win98SE.
I picked one up at a thrift store a few years ago and used it on 98SE. Had to find the software first, but it was functional.
Got this for Xmad one year. Pretty sure it is still in a box in the garage aonewhere.
I literally just found mine in a box. Also in the box, my old Canon Xapshot still video camera!
Does your Xapshot still work?
In Europe I only remember seeing the logo but nobody really used that. There were TV cards that could do the same but real time because of PCI bandwidth. I once hooked up a VCR and digitized some minutes before I ran out of my meager hard drive space gave up on the idea.
What parallel port modes were you using? The old Windows 3.1 box I'd bet was simple bi-directional with 4 bit input. Does the Snappy support Enhanced Parallel port (8 bit input) and Enhanced Capability Port (8 bit input with DMA) modes?
Bi-directional mode was 'always there' but it took a software hack to make use of it. Someone figured out that any LPT port that was made to the specifications IBM used could have software read the four status lines as generic data inputs. Using the normal 8 bit data output, software could command a peripheral to split bytes to nybbles and rapidly toggle them to the status lines. Software running on the PC would monitor the status lines and recombine the nybbles into bytes. I first read about this hack in a computer magazine in the early 90's. ISTR it was PC Magazine, might have been another one because I'm not certain if PC Magazine was much for hacking and modifying articles.
It didn't take very long for Bi-Directional LPT to become an officially supported mode.
On the newer computers I was using ECP. The 486 Gateway doesn't support it.
Awesome blast to the past!!
FYI: “Fauve” is pronounced like fob with a v.
I heard Art Bell promoting this product on one of his old shows from coast to coast am. I had to look it up he said it was amazing lol
Oh, how many "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" memes must have started on one of these.
I always laugh at these products that advertised "$$$$100s of free software included!" because the "JimBob's PaintWerkx Deluxe Pro Studio Edition" included graphics editor had an MSRP of $299, when no one ever paid more than $5 for the Shareware version!
I think I remember seeing something like this at our local thrift store (or atleast something with similar packaging), just sitting there for months if not over a year. I don't have any use for one, but I wish i would have taken a photo of it to see if the Snappy was what I saw. (also this is probably the only time ill get first comment so...)
There were other competing parallel port video snapshot devices on the market, but the Snappy was by far the most popular.
16:26 - "Ooh! We have a T-rex!"
Boy is that "snap" capture sloooooooow....
Thank you so much for reviewing this device! It sounds and works like magic, I am surprised it wasn't more popular or even a standard for PCs.
I had an early version and one of the later software updates would pull color video
Good old dayz ❤❤❤
I still got one at home🤣
Is there mention in the thick manual of the notch in the battery cover, which is obviously for a battery eliminator wire?
Yes, the manual mentions it.
Despite one of your slideshow pictures, I see that comments have not been disabled.
5:56 There is going to be an apocalypses before that battery dies ; )
wow I always thought this was powered from the LPT port. 9V battery lol The video quality reminds me of realplayer and dial up
i have one on a shelf some one gave me once .. havent tried it .. dont know if i have software. Looks like i once downloaded a 3.0 CD image called snappy.
Nostalgic 😍