Submission of source code for Movietool

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

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 at 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 at 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 at ltf.dth.dk