>playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources
Eh, a PS2 with a ~300mhz MIPS CPU is more than able to play VCD with MPEG1 encoded video. You must be young, because the PS2 is on par a Pentium MMX/Pentium 2 and for sure you could play MPEG videos back in the day.
If that's all it was doing while the video played, sure. That's not all they were doing while videos played. Often, videos were shown while assets were unloaded from RAM and others were loaded from disk.
PS2 had hardware to decompress DVD quality video with very low cpu overhead. Rad's bink video compression (at the time of the PS2) was slower and more dvd bandwidth heavy, only reason to use it was if you didn't want a separate set of video files for your PS2 game sku.
On the PC Bink was a great choice for FMV as it had a really clean API and 'just worked'.
That's nothing when the PS2 is able to play MPEG2 video (DVD's), something only a late Pentium2 could do, often with a hardware decoder or a good video card.
And the MPEG1 spec is compatible with MPEG2 based decoders on the PS2, so the effort on it would be almost null.
As I said, Gen-Zers understimate late 90's/early 00's hardware.
Also, the PS2 GPU was a data monster, refilling the VRAM like nothing. Ask the PCSX2 developers about that.
Eh, a PS2 with a ~300mhz MIPS CPU is more than able to play VCD with MPEG1 encoded video. You must be young, because the PS2 is on par a Pentium MMX/Pentium 2 and for sure you could play MPEG videos back in the day.