October 8, 2019
In the early days (1990s) of the Internet there was a race to see who would dominate streaming media. Players included Apple (Quicktime), RealNetworks (RealAudio/RealVideo), Microsoft Media, Vivo Active, Xing, & VDOnet.
This was long before YouTube. Users and organizations were creating very different types of video content before the time of social media as well.
Enter Brewster Khale who started the Internet Archive in 1996 with the intent of saving Internet data history on disk for later reference.
Many of these static streaming video files were saved to the Internet Archive disks over time, that's 23 years now!
In our effort to provide an extremely diverse video search experience, we decided to look into the idea of allowing users to locate these "legacy" media files from the Internet Archive with Petey Vid, download and play them!
Keep in mind, there are no longer any web enabled players for browsers for these media files. However, the media player VLC still provides compatibility with these old formats (once they have been downloaded), and even on a mobile device, wow- thanks VLC!
We are happy to announce we have begun including these files, and their associated metadata into Petey Vid for you to locate and then play with VLC. Many of these media files have long since vanished from the "live" Internet (including YouTube) and cannot be found anywhere else.
Simply add +archived to your search query to find them. In this example we looked for anything with the keyword "bush" in it (above) and NASA (below). As you can see some of these files date back to the 1990s.
Currently we have approximately 300,000+ files of RealMedia (video) and QuickTime (video) included in Petey Vid and continue to gather more each day.
Enjoy! - Petey
