Announcing Movietool version 1.1.

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

Announcing Movietool version 1.1.

This is an improved version of Movietool version 1.0.  Movietool is a
display tool for sequences of Sun rasterfiles, providing "video animation"
in a SunView window.  Movietool may also be used as a multi-rasterfile
previewer.

Compared to version 1.0, I have made several improvements in display speed
and functionality:

* A "Clipping" button has been added.  If you flip Clipping Off,
  rasterfiles which are being played with the -encoded flag will be written
  directly to the framebuffer.  This bypasses a decoding to an internal
  memory pixrect, and effectively doubles the display rate.  However, it is
  recommended to select Resize=>FullScreen in order to avoid messing up
  other windows.

* The zoom function is much improved, allowing huge memory savings.  The
  scan lines are initially zoomed in the horizontal direction, only, and
  replicated in the vertical direction at display time.  Also, you can now
  combine the -zoom and -encoded flags, since RT_BYTE_ENCODED images may now
  be both decoded and zoomed at display time.

* A -audio flag has been added, allowing Movietool to play your favorite
  audio file on the system's internal speaker, if this hardware is
  available.

* A -background flag that sets the color of the playing canvas outside of
  the displayed image to a particular color.  At present, the upper left
  pixel of the current image is used as background color.

* Numerous little twists.

General comments:
-----------------

We use Movietool a lot for animation on the computer, as well as for video
animation.  We simply record Movietool playing the image sequence, and we
like the simplicity of this solution a lot.  Using Movietool in connection
with an animation controller (such as the Lyon Lamb MiniVas) or a laser
video disk system may or may not be the easiest way to generate
single-frame recordings.  If someone finds a good way to interface
Movietool to video equipment, please let me know.

What I would really like for video animation is a hardware solution to
generate video signals in an inexpensive way.  The functionality of the
Lyon Lamb RTC-7 box seems desirable, but it is too expensive for us.  How
about a frame buffer card for the SPARCstation-1 that produces video
signals for plain TVs, at TV resolution ?  Then you would direct the
display of Movietool to this framebuffer.  Anyone knowledgable on this
issue is urged to enlighten me on the possibilities that exist today.

The limiting factor to the performance of Movietool seems to be the
bandwidth of some internal bus, probably the memory-to-framebuffer
transfer rate.  Therefore infinite RAM memory and a very fast CPU won't
help you to display large color images at real-time speed.  On my
SPARCstation-1/GX I can display 500 by 500 pixel color images at 19 frames
per second, giving me an effective bandwidth of about 5 Mbytes per second.

I have recently used the VORT ray tracing package from dgh at ecr.mu.oz.au
for generating pretty image sequences.  Since I didn't find raster
conversion packages that would convert VORT files to Sun rasterfiles, I
made a little utility for that purpose.  Write me for a copy.

I ask you for suggestions of improvements, such as the SPARC assembler
code module requested below.  Also, if you like Movietool and have
produced pretty and/or impressive movie sequences, please offer me a copy
of the rasterfile sequence so that I can show it off locally.

How to obtain movietool:
------------------------

The full archive is available from titan.rice.edu (see below).  These
files are also available by anonymous FTP from oersted.ltf.dth.dk
(129.142.66.16) in the ~/pub directory.  Please use titan.rice.edu from
the American side of the Atlantic.  If you don't have FTP access to
Internet, please use the Rice archive server.

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:
------

The decoding of RT_BYTE_ENCODED images would ideally be performed by a
graphics hardware accelerator such as the GX, reducing CPU and bus load.
Since I don't have the XGL library at my disposal, I don't know if this is
possible or not.

On the other hand, it would be great is someone who knows the SPARC
assembler would recode and optimize the module pr_decode.c in order to
boost performance.

I have no current plans to convert to XView.  If someone wants to make the
conversion, please send the result to me for further distribution.

Author:
-------

        Ole H. Nielsen
        Lab of Applied Physics, Bygn. 307
        Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark
        E-mail: ohnielse at ltf.dth.dk

[[Ed's Note: The whole package is now available in the archives and these
files supersede the old movietool files. -bdg]]

FTP:    Hostname : titan.rice.edu (128.42.1.30)
        Directory: sun-source
        Filename : movietool.shar.{1-6}    [Shar file for movietool]
        Filesize : 86239 bytes total (17516 largest)
        Filename : movietool.uu.{1-8}      [Audio file for movietool]
        Filesize : 140531 bytes total (19902 largest)
        Filename : movieras.uu.{1-34}
        Filesize : 670690 bytest total (19902 largest)

Archive Server Address: archive-server at rice.edu
Archive Server Command: send sun-source {filename_from_above}

Please note that all files have been broken into 20k chunks so everyone can
retrieve them. To rebuild them, follow these procedures:

movietool.shar.{1-6}:
  % cat movietool.shar.? > movietool.shar
  % sh movietool.shar

movietool.uu.{1-8}:
  % cat movietool.uu.? > movietool.uu
  % uudecode movietool.uu
  % (movietool.au is created)

movieras.uu.{1-34}:
  % cat movieras.uu.? movieras.uu.1? movieras.uu.2? movieras.uu.3? >
mras.uu
  % uudecode mras.uu
  % uncompress movietool.rasters.tar.Z
  % tar -xf movietool.rasters.tar
  % (then follow instructions unpacked)