And if Wikipedia is to be believed it’s presented in a eye wateringly high resolution of 112p.
This high of res.
Edit: Of course the bit rate was pretty damn low as well. Here’s a comparison video I found. This comparison uses the higher bit rate version from the Shrek GBA video cart not the Shrek+Shark Tale video cart though so keep in mind, this is the better version.
They also ran at a much lower frame rate and compressed the audio quite a bit
Basically they had to fit both movies in less than 64MB.
64 MB… including the player and codec! The GBA cannot decode video natively so a lot of trickery was required to get a decent performance.
Yes, there were way more efficient ways to store video on the go in the 2000s, like MiniDVD players with tiny screens. The codec is in firmware and the video format and medium is standardized. It’s the easiest way to sell small, cheap gigabytes of storage if you need no quick random access. And the family might already have the more useful laptop-like portable DVD player with a full-sized drive and almost every home video title was available on those.
To be fair, we still do a similar thing with movies today when we want to send them on discord, crunching it down to 25-50MB
I wasn’t expecting to watch Tremors while sitting on the toilet this evening but here we are.
](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/HWQAAOSwQgllAO4S/s-l1600.jpg){kind=link}