Are there any old video codecs/containers that can't be played today?

[lingyi]

I just posted in a thread that any video codec/container today will be playable by children in the foreseeable future. Which got me wondering, it's been ~27 years since the introduction of Cinepak (1991) and AFAIK, it's still playable (I don't have a sample anymore) either through current media players with the codec or an older version of Windows with the appropriate media player. If can be played, it can be frame-served to a conversion program or screen capped.

With the possible of exception of some odd proprietary video game FMV formats and maybe some very early QT .MOVs, isn't every other format and container playable today and into the foreseeable future?

[KarMa]

I can't think of any distributed format and container that isn't decodable. Even the internally used Westwood Codec for games like Command and Conquer for the cheesy cutscenes can be decoded and even encoded into. Though it's super clunky. Recently someone posted a very obscure format from the 90s that even I had never heard of but it was still playable in normal VLC. FFMPEG even recently provided support to VP3 for no apparent demand other than to have it. As long as you have a computer that can run current versions of FFMPEG then you probably won't be locked out of these formats.

[pandy]

I just posted in a thread that any video codec/container today will be playable by children in the foreseeable future. Which got me wondering, it's been ~27 years since the introduction of Cinepak (1991) and AFAIK, it's still playable (I don't have a sample anymore) either through current media players with the codec or an older version of Windows with the appropriate media player. If can be played, it can be frame-served to a conversion program or screen capped.

With the possible of exception of some odd proprietary video game FMV formats and maybe some very early QT .MOVs, isn't every other format and container playable today and into the foreseeable future?

All codecs are playable, there is always someone in the world with player/decoder for most weirdest container/codec... so many people playing games on Atari 2600 nowadays... you can always run particular computer emulator and use original software to decode such files (IMHO mostly 60/70/80 porn).