The early stage of video movement development, which roughly spanned from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, was a period of rudimentary exploration. At that time, the technology was relatively backward, and video movements were mainly used in simple video playback scenarios such as early advertising players. Due to the limitation of hardware level, the screen size of the supporting video movements was relatively small, mostly around 2.4 inches. The resolution was also low, and the picture clarity was far from meeting the later needs. In terms of memory, it was generally only 128MB to 512MB, which could only store a small amount of video files with low code rate. The playback method was relatively single, mainly relying on simple button control, and the functional buttons were only limited to basic operations such as play/pause and power on/off. The stability and compatibility of the movement were also insufficient, and it was prone to problems such as stuck and unable to play normally.

From the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, video movements entered a stage of rapid technical iteration and functional expansion. With the development of integrated circuit technology, the performance of the core chips of the movement was significantly improved, which laid a solid foundation for the expansion of multiple functions. In terms of screen size, there was a breakthrough from the previous single small size, and 4.3-inch and 5-inch screens gradually became the mainstream configurations. These screens had higher resolution and better color reproduction, making the video playback effect significantly improved. The memory capacity also achieved a leap, expanding from the original hundreds of megabytes to 1GB to 8GB, which could store more high-definition video content. More importantly, the playback methods became more diversified. On the basis of button playback, magnetic control playback and light control playback were successively developed and applied. Magnetic control playback realized the start and stop of video playback through the induction of magnetic signals, which was widely used in scenarios such as door - to - door advertising machines; light control playback used photosensitive components to sense changes in ambient light, and automatically triggered playback when the light reached a certain condition, which was more energy - saving and intelligent. At the same time, the functional buttons were also enriched, adding practical operations such as volume increase/decrease, fast forward/rewind, and file selection, which greatly improved the user operation experience.