This article reprises the description of the Berkeley software-only MPEG-1 video decoder originally published in the proceedings of the 1st International ACM Conference on Multimedia in 1993. The software subsequently became widely used in a variety of research systems and commercial products. Its main impact was to provide a platform for experimenting with streaming compressed video and to expose the strengths and weaknesses of software-only video decoding using general purpose computing architectures. This article compares the original performance results with experiments run on a modern processor to demonstrate the gains of processing power in the past ten years relative to this specific application and discusses the history of MPEG-1 video software decoding and the Berkeley MPEG research group.