I looked into this a bit a while ago, what Sloot did was at least a little novel. Basically the way his encoding scheme actually worked was that it would store each line of video into a database, encode each video frame as a series of line lookups, and then store that encoded frame into another database. Then each video is a series of frame lookups. When you hear accounts of him being able to demo smooth playback of 16 videos at once on late 90s hardware, this is how he did it. Because each frame is a series of line lookups, splitting the screen horizontally 16 times and playing 16 videos at once is not any more taxing than playing a single video fullscreen. Similarly, he was able to fast-forward and rewind smoothly because each frame is individually decoded, it's not like traditional video compression where you have to calculate differences from each keyframe. Playing at 2x speed was not any more taxing than 1x speed. Of course he never would have been able to store a video file in 8KB or whatever, but this meant that (for example) if you had a whole season of a TV show in your database, the opening and ending credits would only be stored once.
Interesting. Do you have any resources you can share?
There's a good podcast about the whole saga here (with a transcript):
https://corecursive.com/sloot-digital-coding-system/ and Sloot's patent is here:
https://patents.google.com/patent/NL1009908C2/en .
One thing to note is that Sloot consistently refers to his scheme as "encryption" rather than "compression". His encoding scheme originated as a method to encrypt TV repair manuals for his previous project, RepaBase. The idea was that they'd send out a compressed and encrypted database of repair manuals for free, then whenever a technician needed one he would call up RepaBase and pay for the key for that manual. That way, a tech would only need to pay for the manuals he needed instead of for the whole database. The video encoding scheme was basically the same idea except the key was stored on a smart card. Of course the scammy part was misleading investors into believing that all the video data was somehow stored in that decryption key.
Block deduplication. This is how Enterprise storage arrays (such as NetApp Deduplication) and local file systems (like ZFS and Microsoft ReFS via Windows Server Data Deduplication) (and normalized databased in general) work.
