In October of 2000, we bought a new digital camera: the Olympus D-490Z. I can't get enough of it, and keep taking pictures of everything (about 1300 of them by the end of December). We had a great snowstorm on the 31st of December, and I went out in the middle of the storm to take some pictures of our house.
And then there's the geeky part: the camera will also take 15-second Quicktime video clips. I really don't like forcing my friends and relatives to download the QuickTime player from Apple, since it doesn't play well with the rest of Windows and nags about upgrades nonstop; I'd rather distribute videos as MPEGs. So, I spent some time researching Quicktime, and found that the D-490Z encodes its movies using a JPEG video compressor. That's right: the 15 frames per second are just a series of 320x240 jpegs. Using quicktime4linux, I wrote a simple program to extract the encoded video frames, and then used the Berkeley mpeg encoder (mpeg_encode) to create MPEG-1 movies out of the frames (mpeg_encode doesn't support 15fps, so I had to double the frame rate to 30fps). The resulting movies are about half the size of the original Quicktime movies.
And here are those movies. Each is about 2 MB (about a minute to download on a 22.8 modem).