yup. i remember the only way to view an Mpeg was to convert it into ANIM format. then you can get a full 50FPS... of either 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128/256 colours. there are some Ham and Ham8 anims out there but they are usually a but slower as the chipset has to do a bit more work and thrash the chipram bus. ANIM files were usually of the order of k's, but could go to megs and megs. so direct hard disk playback was required for big anims so the anim didn't have to be loaded entirly into ram as witrh early players. just need enuff ram for the page buffers. but totally loading into ram is good for max smoothiness.
look up biganim on aminet or something for hard disk playback, or cyberanim for GFX card support, so anim files can be limitless in size, but there isn't really any compression to speak of. at the time when you only had a 7Mhz CPU you need all the CPU time you can get, and on-the-fly decompression with that limit wasn't even considered. also having a lossey based compression wasn't really a good thing for quality. so each frame was as good as the last, and good enuff for a picture in its own right. can't really say that for Mpeg1. mmmm wasn't video CD a success....
