ohnielse@ltf.dth.dk (Ole Holm Nielsen) (03/21/90)
Announcing movietool version 1.0. Movietool is a display tool for sequences of Sun rasterfiles, providing "video animation" in a Sun window. Movietool may also be used as a multi-rasterfile previewer. Movietool displays a sequence of color or monochrome raster files (see man 5 rasterfile) in real-time or near-real-time. On a Sun 3/50M with 4 MB of RAM, monochrome images of 600 by 800 pixels may be played at about 16 frames per second. On a SPARC-1/GX a full screen of monochrome images may be played at about 50 frames per second. Color images take of the order of 8 times longer than comparable monochrome images. The development of movietool was originally inspired by the VCR code developed by Hsuan Chang <hsc@vuse.vanderbilt.edu>, as announced in sun-spots v8n68 (it no longer seems to exist at titan.rice.edu). However, movietool has rather improved functionality and significantly better performance than VCR. We have used movietool for half a year now to display results of simulations, and we use a frame scan converter to record on video tape. There are undoubtedly features that some of you might like to add to movietool, and I'll be glad to learn of improvements or suggestions thereof. How to obtain movietool: ------------------------ From titan.rice.edu you get the files movietool-1.0.tar and possibly movietool.rasters.tar.Z. These files are also available by anonymous FTP from oersted.ltf.dth.dk (129.142.66.16) in the ~/pub directory. Please don't overload the transatlantic link when obtaining movietool. [[Ed's Note: Okay, these are in place. -bdg]] FTP: Hostname : titan.rice.edu (128.42.1.30) Directory: sun-source Filenames: movietool-1.0.tar movietool.rasters.tar.Z Archive Server Address: archive-server@rice.edu Archive Server Command: send sun-source {filename-from-above} Testing: -------- There is a compressed tar-file of rasters: movietool.rasters.tar.Z which may be unpacked by "make rasters" (almost 1 Mbyte in 50 files). To play this (monochrome) movie, say "movietool tp*". To do: ------ Find out how to decode RT_BYTEENCODED rasters within a graphics accelerator, such as the GX (cg6) accelerator, in order to boost performance. Rewrite movietool for OpenWindows and/or SunVideo and/or SunVision. Write an interface to a video animation system, such as the Lyon Lamb MINIVAS controller, so that the sequence of pictures will be recorded on video tape. The SunVideo system, or some type of frame-scan converter, may be used to generate the video signal. I hope that you will like movietool. Ole H. Nielsen Lab of Applied Physics, Bygn. 307 Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby E-mail: ohnielse@ltf.dth.dk