August 4, 2026
Buffering... into a computer
Video2NAND – Abusing video codecs for great computational power
People turned a video file trick into a fake computer—and the comments want Doom
TLDR: A developer showed that a video format can be twisted into acting like simple computer logic, using picture blocks as stand-ins for on/off signals. Commenters were impressed but divided: some called it a brilliant hack, while others demanded something more practical—or at least cursed enough to dream about a tiny Doom machine.
A wonderfully nerdy experiment just dropped: someone figured out how to use parts of a video format, VP8, to imitate the tiny on/off switches that power computing. In plain English, they’re using the rules a video player follows to rebuild simple logic inside an image, turning black-and-white blocks into pretend wires and gates. It’s the kind of idea that makes half the internet yell “genius!” and the other half ask “okay, but what is this actually for?”
And wow, the community did not hold back. The biggest mood in the comments was a playful split between admiration and impatience. One camp loved the sheer absurd brilliance of making a computer-ish system out of video compression tricks. The other camp basically said: cute, but where’s the payoff? The spiciest criticism came from people who wanted “great computational power” to mean something more dramatic than proving you can build a NAND gate, the basic building block of logic. In other words: show us something real, not just a tech magic trick.
Then came the classic internet escalation. One commenter sighed that it’s “not Turing complete (yet)”, which is nerd-speak for “nice stunt, call me when it can do everything a real computer can.” Another instantly started doing back-of-the-envelope math and dreaming bigger: no, it probably won’t run Doom—because of course Doom got mentioned in spirit—but maybe a tiny CPU isn’t impossible. So the vibe is clear: the article delivered a brain-melting demo, and the comments immediately turned it into a debate over whether this is brilliant research, a glorified party trick, or the first step toward the most cursed computer ever built.
Key Points
- •The article proposes using the VP8 video codec’s prediction mechanisms to simulate combinatorial logic circuits.
- •It explains that video codecs define structures and primitives for encoding and decoding frames, with key-frames and inter-frames serving different roles.
- •VP8 intra-frame prediction works from already decoded neighboring pixels and blocks as decoding proceeds from top-left to bottom-right.
- •The construction described in the article uses only key-frames rather than inter-frames.
- •Logical values are represented by fully white or fully black blocks, while H_PRED and V_PRED are used to model wires and the system aims to build functionally complete logic from NOT and AND gates.