The media in their day, which was often HD 1080P (more realistically 720P, but that's mostly down to what screens were available - not a restriction the PC hardware suffered from). Still the majority of TVs and monitors being sold are 1080P, or even 720P, yet 1600x1200 monitors, and the hardware that could drive them, were out in the ninetees.

Don't neglect that PCs were juggling multiple apps(and monitors) at these resolutions by the late ninetees as well, and dedicated mpeg encode/decode was not at all uncommon. It was part of the MMX instruction set for Pentium CPUs, including the Pentium that came in my 2001-era Gateway the government gave me more or less for free.

The mid-aughts were not some ancient land of techno-boredom and tech mediocrity. This current future we find ourselves in is just extra pathetic when you hold up the bullshit we've accepted in exchange for pitiful technological progress(for you or I), versus what we already had twenty years ago. The main differences now are truly down to power consumption and portability, although the iPhone came out in 2007, and my color PalmPilot played video well in 2003(limitations were, yes, storage, and slow wifi)

1999: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/779230

Edit: just (re-)read your bit about how capturing greater than 420P video was impossible. My wedding in 2007 was recorded in 720P.