Peanuts NeXT Software Archives/Peanuts-3.iso/Graphics/movie/Movie.3.README

Text File | 1995-08-01 | 8.9 KB | 197 lines

31-Jul-1995 Andreas Windemuth ([e-mail])

Some changes:

    Added support for Quicktime and other formats by integrating
    Mark Podlipec's ([e-mail]) Xanim software.
    Source of a modified, X-less version of Xanim is included.
    Many formats should work, only one particular Quicktime format
    was tested. Please report work/no work observations to me.

    Easy push-one-button compilation from project builder,
    including Xanim and mpegDecode.

    The former, somewhat obscure, "Play" option has now become
    the default "Open", allowing the playback of arbitrarily large
    movies from disk without crashing the machine. There is
    limited control of playback in this mode, in particular no
    reverse mode is possible. The movie can be stopped and
    closed by hitting the stop button twice. The maximum
    frame rate is limited by the decoding from disk process and
    depends on compression type, disk speed and cpu power.

    If you want all the playback control, lots of speed and have
    enough memory, use the new "Load" option, which loads the
    whole movie into memory. Very high frame rates are then
    possible. This is the original Movie playback mode.

    No sound support. You are encouraged to contribute.

    The Xanim interface uses full 32-bit resolution. This could
    be reduced to get higher playback speeds.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
30-Dec-1994 Mike Carlton ([e-mail])

Made a few minor changes:
    Added support for file extension ".mpeg" (in MovieView.m and
    ProjectBuilder attributes) to work more gracefully with OmniWeb

    Included the source to mpegDecode (obtained from the MPEGPlay
    2.3 source by Brian Willoughby).  The MPEGPlay source is
    available via anonymous ftp from
        sonata.cc.purdue.edu:3.0/src/MPEGPlay2.3.tar.Z

    Recompiled triple fat ('cause I wanted an MPEG player on my HP)

    Bumped version number to 2.51.2

The original README follows.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Movie 2.51.1: Even more improved TIFF sequence animator

Modifications by Andreas Windemuth
Columbia University
630 West 168th St. BB-221
New York, NY 10032
[e-mail]

Using some code from MPEGPlay2.3 by
Brian Willoughby        Software Design Engineer, BSEE NCSU
[e-mail]    Sound Consulting: Software Design and Development
NeXTmail welcome

Original code (mostly intact) by
Patrick J. Flynn, School of EE&CS, Washington State University,
Pullman, WA, USA 99164-2752.  Email: [e-mail]

Credit also belongs to anybody else who contributed to the code
without my knowledge.

New features:
    reads and plays mpeg encoded videos
    displays frames, frame size and frame number while loading
    memory saving play-from-disk mode (no speed control)
    reenabled tiff-sequence input

New user interace elements:
    Open has been replaced by Load and Play, where Load is just
    like the old Open, and Play plays the movie directly from disk,
    with minimum memory usage for arbitrarily large movies, but
    no control panel, limited speed and no smoothing.

    An additional switch on the control panel for displaying the
    frame number in the picture, without the overhead associated
    with slider update.

This is a modified Movie (version 2.51), the original of which
was written by Patrick J. Flynn and posted to the net quite some
time ago. This improved version is capable of loading and
displaying MPEG video files. The other application for
doing that, MPEGPlayer by Brian Willoughby, does not
use the window server efficiently and is much slower
than Movie as a consequence. I stole the mpegDecode program
and very little source code from that application to include in
this version of Movie. Some sample MPEG movies are included,
They are from the network, I don't remember where I got them.

Movie.app runs on black or white hardware, both in black&white
or color. Longer movies take a lot of memory, the movies included
as examples all run without swapping on my 40Mb ALR Evolution
V/60 Pentium machine. Playback will only be smooth if all frames
fit into memory. I have observed very high frame rates, up to more
than 100fps, on both the Pentium color machine and black and white
NeXTstations. This is depending on frame size, of course. 30fps is
possible with all movies I have tried, if no zoom is used.

Movies can be played directly from disk, to allow for low memory
and long movies. No frame rate control is available with that feature.
If you don't have a Pentium or if the frame size is more than 20000
pixels decoding is likely to be too slow for smooth playback.

If you want to see mpeg movies, you have to have the mpegDecode
program. I don't have the source for that anymore, but it is freely
available with the MPEGPlay software. Look for it on the archives.
A fat executable is also included in the Movie-2.51.1 binary distribution.

The README files of the original Movie-2.51 and MPEGPlay2.6
are reproduced below. Don't use this code for commercial purposes
without asking the people who wrote it how much they want for their
share.

Enjoy!

Andreas Windemuth

+--------------------------------------------------------------------
|Columbia University, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics
|630 West 168th St. BB-221 | tel: [phone], fax: 6926, NeXTmail
|New York, NY 10032        | email: [e-mail]
+--------------------------------------------------------------------


Improvements from 2.5 to 2.51:
 - fixed bug in IB.proj that kept preferences from working.
 - fixed bug(s) in save: method (MovieView.m)
 - made the text in the Help window selectable so users can copy the
   tiff2anim shell script.

Movie is a TIFF sequence animator.

The widely-used standard file structure for a movie is a directory

NAME.anim

with contents

NAME.1.tiff, NAME.2.tiff, ...

Where NAME is the name of the movie.  The base name of the directory
(less `.anim') must be the same as the bane names of the TIFF files.
Each TIFF file should contain one TIFF image.  The TIFF files must be
numbered consecutively starting from 1.  The program is smart enough
to figure out how many frames there are.

I also recommend that all .anim directories contain a README file
giving the origins of the movie, any special hints for viewing it, etc.

A sample movie (3aug-6prism.anim) has been included.  You should probably
run it in bounce mode.

How to install Movie:

Copy it to ~/Apps or /LocalApps or wherever you would like.

Copyright: none.

Author: Patrick J. Flynn, School of EE&CS, Washington State University,
        Pullman, WA, USA 99164-2752.  Email: [e-mail]


|===============================================


This is a new release of MPEG_Play.  A FAT binary version has been requested by many, and is finally available now that I have 3.1 and limited access to an Intel machine running NS486 for test purposes.  Intel performance is not as good as Black hardware, but we all know who makes better machines!
---
Brian Willoughby        Software Design Engineer, BSEE NCSU
[e-mail]    Sound Consulting: Software Design and Development
NeXTmail welcome


From the Info Panel:

MPEG Play is in the process of evolving from a bare-bones MPEG animation viewer into a full-fledged NeXT application.  The current version is multi-threaded and supports the simultaneous loading and playback of multiple "mini-videos" at different rates as high as 28 frames per second.  There is a group of "live controls" which can be manipulated even while the video is playing.  MPEG Play will keep track of different settings for each window, reflecting the current values in the Window Settings panel whenever you select a new main window.  When playback is complete, a few interesting performance statistics are shown.

Notes:
You may have to wait some time after opening a new file before it will be shown.  The frames will be counted as they are loaded.  This version is not recommended for NeXT systems without substantial system RAM and swap space.  I have not personally used this software on anything other than a NeXTdimension with 88 MB of RAM, but future versions of MPEG Play will be adjusted for any problems with other systems.  I have updated to version 2.0 of the mpeg_play code from Berkeley.  B&W support is temporarily disabled.  You can reach me as [e-mail]

Original Version:
MPEG Play is a bare-bones MPEG animation viewer.  It's free, subject to the standard GNU copyright restrictions and those in the X-windows MPEG viewer software out of which I hacked the mpegDecoder code.  If you make any improvements, especially in speed and/or image quality, please share the code and drop me a note at  [e-mail].

Using MPEG Play:
Open an MPEG document using the menu item.  The filename must end in ".mpg" for the file to be recognized.  A window will appear and the animation will start after a few seconds.  Hit the Play Again menu item to restart at frame 1.  Use the Colorspace and Zoom radio buttons to set the window's attributes.

Enjoy.