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Floppy Disk Video Puzzle

Last Updated: 09/12/2024

Each year my friends and I have do a secret santa. The first year was relatively tame, but the second year descended into chaos. My gift was a cameo from Nigel Farage that cost over £80, and there were various penis related / other humerous gifts. This year is year 3, and the chaos needs to be embraced further.

Typically a 'Humerous Video' is produced by one of the friends which is essentially a compilation of random clips / images from the friend group. This year, I decided I would make one to accompany my gifts. I also decided I could put a QR code to an amazon voucher at the end to have some form of serious gift (as the physical items I bought were various cardbord cutouts).

Now making a funny video with a voucher code might have been enough, but I was browsing ebay and came across a pack of 30 brand new floppy disks for relatively cheap. Thats where I came up with the idea to split the video across all 30 floppies.

But it goes further. I could have given them a stack of disks, a USB FDD and a modern computer to get the file off. But I remembered that I have an old Toughbook from the late 90s that runs WIndows 98, and has a floppy drive. Now they would have to do all of this on an old, slow computer.

This caused a bit of a challenge for me too however, as I needed to convert the video into a format that could actually play on an old 233mhz mobile Pentium MMX. I am yet to know if the video conversion I did will work, as I am currently not at home where the toughbook is. I have tried the video in PCem with a similarly specced machine, and it sort of worked? Hopefully I can get an MPEG file to work, however I also have a Cinepak version that is likely to be more compatible but has a much larger file size as i'm guessing the compression is a lot simpler for older machines.

As of writing this, I am yet to test the video out on hardware. I will update once I have the video working and written to the floppies, and I will also report on the success of the recipient obtaining the video.