Yes!!! I remember this too!!!

But it was so long ago I don’t have the link, I only responded to you to help verify that it was a real thing and you’re not dreaming

Or maybe we all are dreaming 🧐

Ok that got meta quickly

I remember RMVB being very popular for animated shows (I seem to remember Family Guy most of all). It had very good compression ratios.

I remember watching ~50 MB RMVB anime fansub releases circa 2004.

Yes, this was how I was able to watch 200 Naruto episodes before there was streaming video. Good times torrenting all these RealPlayer files on my 50KB/s DSL connection/

My network provider capped my bandwidth to 1mbps because of this for like five years in the early to mid 2000s. They said I used more bandwidth than an entire apartment building (not a small one). Very early days of mainstream pirating. It was a makeshift internet provider that used (stole, I guess) internet access from a nearby university.

Not a special encoder, but i've seen (and used) waifu-2x to upscale low-bitrate/low-resolution video.

I also swear that I've already seen a vector/cartoon optimized codec, but my google-ability are lacking.