Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 12:59:20 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: Bora Ertung <ertung AT silo DOT csci DOT unt DOT edu>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: AVI or GIF viewer
In-Reply-To: <329C8F49.178C@silo.csci.unt.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.961128125055.2645A-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Wed, 27 Nov 1996, Bora Ertung wrote:

[...]
> http://oak.oakland.edu</a>. On the other hand, unfortunately, I dont
> know any AVI player source around, if you find any mail the name of the 
> place you got it.
> 
> Good Luck 
> Bora
> 

A very nice freeware AVI/anything player which I immediately thought about
when reading the previous post was XAnim by Mark Podlipec. Unfortunately
it's for X and I don't think it would be trivial to extract the AVI player
part. Please note that I'm no expert on X programming but:

  - XAnim implements each movie format (SGI movie, AVI, QT, etc..) in
    one source file. This would imply that the movie decoders read the
    movie in and convert it into an internal format

  - I would guess that this internal format is just a byte array which is
    converted into an XImage and blitted onto the screen. This part is
    done by the X server so you'd probably have to write your own using
    VESA calls or whatnot

Another rather important note: specially for QuickTime format, but also
some AVI and IBM Ultimotion video files, these files are encoded in a
proprietary format called Radius Cinepak. Apparently this is only for 16-
and 24-bit images. Most QuickTime files created on Macs _are_ encoded with
Radius Cinepak because it comes with the Mac or something (the encoder).
This is different from the data fork/resource fork thing!

The upshot is that Radius requires a nondisclosure agreement if you want
the decoder code. What the author of XAnim does is, he signed this
agreement, then builds .o files for the Radius decoder. So, XAnim is 100%
free with source, but if you want the Radius decoder, you'll have to get
the .o file for your machine (MUST BE UNIX THOUGH) and link it into your
binary. Source unavailable. And the bad thing is, 90% of all QT files you
can find on the net (eg from MTV online)  _do_ have this Radius Cinepak
compression so even if you get a public movie player (other than XAnim)
running, these files will not be viewable with your program.

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| Orlando Andico                email: orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph |
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