# File format nostalgia
[2026-05-02_formats]

Modified: 2026-05-12 @ 13:05:28 (Tuesday)
txt

#tech #list

File formats I miss even though I no longer have any reason to.

## § DivX/XviD ^

There's no reason I know of to use this codec today, but it used to be amazing to me, it was so small and looked so good. There was decent support for it on consumer hardware, too --- I still have a DVD player that supports it --- so I guess that's one reason.

I really miss this site that DivX-the-company ran for only like a year or two called Stage6. They let you upload long HD videos (way before YouTube did) and had lax copyright enforcement. You could search up almost any show and just watch it right in the browser; it was how I watched Doctor Who. It was fast and free and so nice while it lasted. In this era, people used `.divx`/`.xvid` container files, so I'm pointlessly nostalgic for that too.

And yes, it must be capitalized that way. It's the law.

## § RealMedia Variable Bitrate (.rmvb) ^

This is another one that wowed me for its super low filesizes once upon a time. I mostly used it for anime, which I think benefited from its low framerate. There were these great sites where you could download them directly; IIRC, my favorite one had a single page for each show with a direct link to each episode. (I wish I could remember what it was called... I think it had an angel on the banner?) They downloaded really fast. (Can't remember if I was still on dial-up, but I had a slow connection either way.)

I think this one died off (and never got that popular in the first place) because... you had to install RealPlayer. This was the Windows XP era and you had to install a bunch of crap to watch videos; that was fine and accepted. But I recall RealPlayer being more annoying with its advertising and intrusive of your system than like, QuickTime, the other irritating commercial player you had to install. It had a lot of haters. Then we were liberated by the CCCP. (And then VLC liberated us from its Stalinist reign.)

## § Anti-nostalgia: AVI ^

I hate AVI.

It always felt like such a luck of the draw as to what was inside the AVI. I guess that's still the case with other containers today but it doesn't matter as much since everything supports everything.

`.avi` used to be used for everything. It was adequate, but it had the drawback of not supporting embedded subtitles, so they had to be distributed as a separate file. I associate this format with hardsubbed (subtitles "burned in") anime and with DVD rips that look like crap (fucking deinterlace goddammit! why are interlacing artifacts still a thing!) and should be repeated with a modern encoder (DVD rips do not have to look that bad!).

Tangent: Hardsubs used to be convenient back in the day because you didn't need a separate file and they could be pre-rendered with fancy decorations that your player might not support. (If you use a Roku in 2026, it's like it's still 2006: the built-in player has no support for styled subs or for bitmap subs --- the kind BluRays use.) They were of course very annoying when you wanted to use a different set of subtitles. You sometimes saw (see) hard-coded subtitles from DVDs, which use a bitmap font that looks fucking awful. If you want to view old low-resolution content on a high-resolution screen, hardsubs (and bitmap softsubs) get scaled up along with the video and look blurry and terrible. This has actually been a problem on computers ever since monitor resolutions started vastly outstripping SD TV resolutions, which is to say pretty much immediately.

## § See Also ^