How come cartridges, such as the ones used in the Nintendo 64, are able to fit so much 3D models and music but struggle with videos?

Question

How come cartridges, such as the ones used in the Nintendo 64, are able to fit so much 3D models and music but struggle with videos?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

3D models don’t take up much space. Naively storing 100 triangles with each of its 3 corners having 3 coordinates of 4 bytes each, that’s a mere 3.6kb even before you start optimizing.

Same with N64 music. It was not recorded, and instead stored as a set of notes much like a midi file. That’s also just a handful of kb per track.

Meanwhile, low quality Youtube 240p video uses 3000-4000 kb/minute, and that’s with a modern high quality codec that the N64 can’t decode.