TVone Videos

TV1 [or TVone] is a compact video format designed for low-resolution playback, inspired by the formats of old like realmedia and MPEG-1. Video is encoded at either 96×72 (SQ) or 192×144 pixels (HQ) at 7 fps, with mono audio at 8 kHz. The result is a small, if-be-it low quality video that is easy to embed into a web page with embed.php (being used for the samples →)

The format has evolved through five versions. Early versions store raw RGB24 frames. Later versions introduced inter-frame compression using I-frames and P-frames, cutting file sizes significantly by only storing pixels that changed between frames. Version 5, the current format, adds a per-frame 256-colour palette derived from an RGB332 colour cube, Floyd–Steinberg dithering to smooth colour transitions, and zlib compression on every keyframe; reducing a typical three minute video to around 2~3 MB.

Despite its constraints, TV1 produces recognisable, watchable video with synchronised audio, making it well suited for embedding short clips on web pages where the size is small and a low quality is appceptable.

Downloads

a sample of V5 mode TV1s.