MovieCD is a format for digital video storage and consumer home video playback released in 1996 by Sirius Publishing, and was rendered obsolete by the wider distribution of DVD. It used a video codec called MotionPixels, marketed by MotionPixels, Inc., a subsidiary of Sirius Publishing (founded by Darrel Smith and Richard Gnant). It was used in many third-party video games from the mid to late-1990s, and during the same time on Sirius's MovieCDs that it had been originally developed for, enjoying an international distribution in both forms. Both MovieCDs and the MotionPixels codec remain an issue today in that medium market availability of MovieCDs remained until around the year 2000 and some of the above-mentioned video games still have a cult following, both producing malfunctions in modern PCs due to the outdated MotionPixels codec. Origins and development The MotionPixels (MP) codec used on MovieCDs originated with the Huygen codec developed by Christian Huygen, David Whipple, and Darrell Smith. Specifications and system requirements The MP codec offered a resolution of 320x236 pixels, 16-bit high color, and 16 frames per second fullscreen playback at a datarate of (in theory) up to about 520kB/sec, without having to install MPEG or acquire additional hardware, on Microsoft Windows systems from Windows 3.x on. Audio was saved in plain WAV format. Its FourCC code was, depending on version, "MVI1" or "MVI2." For viewing MovieCDs, Sirius recommended a 486 processor or higher, at least 8 MB of RAM, and a 2x-speed CD-ROM drive (most MovieCDs had a data rate of about 280-300 kB/sec). MovieCDs had a running time of about 45 minutes each, so feature films often were stored on two or three discs in one box, and the consumer had to swap discs to watch the whole movie. The codec avoided digital compression artifacts such as the pixelization or block artifacts (seen in VCDs using MPEG-1) by treating areas of the frame as objects rather than dividing it into blocks. Its output was always RGB; however, the viewer could choose between different settings of chroma subsampling for encoding, from RGB through YCrCb 4:2:2 all the way to 16:1:1 which ensured for low datarates at what were high resolutions at the time, while a particularly low chroma subsampling made for a distinctively analogue video look to today's eyes, with spatially (not temporally) smeared colors and sharp luma. MVI1 MVI1 was a purely DOS-based codec, carrying its animations