How does it work?

Q: With which equipment could we do theses movie?

I have put some money aside after my summer job in 1997 to buy me a standard PC (which was a Pentium I 200MHz MMX). A pentium 120 could do the trick but it might be slow.
You need to reserve a lot of hard drive space. Depending on the quality of the movie you do, 1 meg for each second is frequent.
My PC came with an ATI tech card. I discovered that in my case (and other ATI custumer) that the upgrade for a TV tuner cost only 125$Ca+Tx. There is different companies that offer TV tuner at an affordable price even if you don't have an ATI card tought.

The ATI TV tuner consist in a ISA card equipped with a "multimedia bus" (who looks like an HD flat cable) that connects the TV tuner to the main graphic card (PCI) freeing the CPU of a lot of the work.

People having regular camcorder are lucky... The TV tuner transform any regular camcorder in a low-resolution digital camera. Chat users would be please to hear (or see!) that they can hook up to make videophone conference with other people on the web too.

Q: Is it really useful to code movies (since it is really slow?)

A: Yes, I'm using the format mpeg-1 video that produce files with a ratio of 1:40 to the original AVI. If you think some of my movies takes time to download (they are worth it tought) then can you imagine getting the AVI file (40 times bigger!)?

Q: Is there any other movie formats on the Internet?

A: Yes, thoses which i know:

[ra, ram, rm, rmm] : Real Video, relativly bad visual quality but so much compressed (other coding) that they can be transmitted really fast on the internet (even real time). Player: Real Video. It is a Real Audio's cousin who is a smaller part of the same application.

[ asx,asf, lsx, lsf ]: Microsoft got a new format out and it can be read with the latest version of mplayer. It seem to try to make competition with real video.

[mov, qt]: A QuickTime movie (Apple computer trade mark). I always tought of mov like the Apple side of an AVI. An interesting format that has been upgraded many times with differents special functions (Quicktime VR, even Quicktime movies that interacts over the web like Macromedia's flash).

Q: What are other mpeg players?

All the software above can play mpeg using special "filters" or "decoders". The best one I prefer is actually Microsoft mplayer2 since it is the less complicated one (normally works fine the first time around). You can find it bundled with Internet explorer 5 or just go on Microsoft web site.