Source code contribution: Movietool version 1.3

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

Announcing Movietool version 1.3.

This is an improved version of Movietool version 1.2.  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.

Version 1.3 is mainly improved in its handling of colors: Colormaps with
less than 256 entries are now better handled.  Furthermore, since Sun
monitors tend to show colors as rather dark, an interactive facility has
been added for brightening colors using "Gamma correction".  For video
recordings using Movietool, a fade-in/fade-out feature has been added.

How to obtain movietool:
------------------------
>From titan.rice.edu you get the files movietool-1.3_kit[1-5],
movietool.uu.[1-6] (an audio file), and possibly movieras.uu.[1-34] (a
sample movie in monochrome).  These files are also available by anonymous
FTP from oersted.ltf.dth.dk (129.142.66.16) in the ~/pub directory as
movietool-1.3.shar.Z, movietool.au.Z and movietool.rasters.tar.Z,
respectively.  Please use titan.rice.edu from the American side of the
Atlantic.  If you don't have FTP access to Internet, please send mail to
the Rice archive server (mail the word "help" to
"archive-server at rice.edu".

[[Ed's Note: Here are the relevant files: -bdg]]

FTP	Hostname : titan.rice.edu (128.42.1.30)
	Directory: sun-source
	Filenames: movieras.uu.[1-34]
		   movietool.uu.[1-8]
		   movietool-1.3kit[1-5]
	Filesizes: movieras: 34 files totalling 670690 bytes
		   movietool.uu:  8 files totalling 140531 bytes
		   movietool kit: 5 files totalling 103515 bytes

Archive Server Address: archive-server at rice.edu
Archive Server Command: send sun-source (filename-see above)

Testing:
--------
There is a sample movie in monochrome which may be unpacked from the file
indicated above (almost 1 Mbyte in 50 files).  To play this 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.
My information is that the GX hardware will never be able to handle
run-length decoding.  Hopefully, someone with more detailed knowledge
(hint: Sun Microsystems) might find a way to do this on the GX or one of
the other accelerator boards.

In addition, 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.  ANYONE VOLUNTEERING ??

I will convert Movietool to XView once we decide to use that window
system.  However, the trick of setting window Clipping=False to write
directly on the framebuffer may be hard to implement with an X-windows
server.  If anyone knows how a C application can write directly to the
framebuffer of an X screen, please tell me !

Author:
-------

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