Jonas Eschenburg built a working FMV codec for the Atari ST and used it to play Command and Conquer cutscenes on hardware that predates the game by a decade. The ST runs a Motorola 68000 at 8 MHz with no dedicated graphics chip, 16-color planar video, and no path to stream raw pixel data at any useful frame rate.
The codec is codebook-based, splitting frames into blocks that map cleanly onto the ST's memory layout. Both the palette and the codebook update continuously during playback. The hard constraint is color depth: 16 colors planar versus VGA's 256-color chunky mode means palette selection is the core engineering problem, and Eschenburg's write-up details exactly how he attacks it to keep blocking artifacts below what the architecture would normally guarantee.
The full article on Medium is worth reading for the memory layout analysis alone, not just the results. The port itself is available on Itch.io. Eschenburg is already running the base Command and Conquer game on the ST, making the FMV work an extension of a larger, already-impressive project.
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