NAME
xanim - multiformat animation viewer for X
SYNOPSIS
xanim [ +Vnum ] [ +Aaopts ] [ +Ccopts ] [ +Ggopts ] [
+Mmopts ] [ +Ssopts ] [ +Zzopts ] [ +opts ] animfile [
[ +opts ] [ animfile ] ... ]
DESCRIPTION
XAnim is a program that can display animations of various
formats on systems running X11. XAnim currently supports the
following animation types:
+ FLI animations.
+ FLC animations.
+ IFF animations. The following features are
supported:
-> Compressions 3,5,7,J(movies) and l(small L).
-> Color cycling during single images and anims.
-> Display Modes: depth 1-8, EHB, HAM and HAM8.
+ GIF87a and GIF89a files.
-> single and multiple images supported.
-> GIF89a animation extensions supported.
+ GIF89a animation extension support.
+ a kludgy text file listing gifs and what order to
show them in.
+ DL animations. Formats 1, 2 and partial 3.
+ Amiga PFX(PageFlipper Plus F/X) animations. TEMP
DISABLED
+ Amiga MovieSetter animations(For those Eric Schwartz
fans).
+ Utah Raster Toolkit RLE images and anims.
+ AVI animations. Currently supported are
-> IBM Ultimotion (ULTI) depth 16.
-> JPEG (JPEG) depth 24.
-> Motion JPEG (MJPG) depth 24.
-> Intergraph JPEG (IJPG) depth 24.
-> Microsoft Video 1 (CRAM) depth 8 and 16.
-> Radius Cinepak (CVID) depth 24. TEMP REMOVED
-> Uncompressed (RGB ) depth 8.
-> Uncompressed (RGB ) depth 24.
-> Run length encoded (RLE8) depth 8.
-> Editable MPEG (XMPG) depth 24.
+ Quicktime Animations. The following features are
supported:
-> Uncompressed (RAW ) depth 4,8,16,24 and 24+
-> Uncompressed (RAW ) Gray depth 4 and 8.
-> Apple Graphics (RLE ) depth 1,8,16 and 24.
-> Apple Graphics (RLE ) GRAY depth 8.
-> Apple Animation (SMC ) depth 8 and GRAY 8.
-> Apple Video (RPZA) depth 16.
REMOVED
-> Radius Cinepak (CVID) depth 24 and GRAY 8. TEMP
-> Component Video (YUV2) depth 24.
-> Photo JPEG (JPEG) depth 8 and 24.
-> Supports multiple video trak's.
-> Supports animations with multiple codecs.
-> Supports merged and separated resource forks.
+ JFIF images. NOTE: use XV for single images. This is
more for animation of a sequence of JPEG images.
+ MPEG animations. Currently only Type I Frames are
displayed. Type B and Type P frames are currently
ignored, but will be added in future revs.
+ WAV audio files may have their sound added to any
animation type that doesn't already have audio, by
specifying the .wav file after the animation file on
the command line. Currently only the PCM audio codec
is supported.
+ any combination of the above on the same command
line.
XAnim also provides various options that allow the user to
alter colormaps, playback speeds, looping modes and can
provide on-the-fly scaling of animations with the mouse.
OPTIONS
A + will generally turn an option on and a - will turn an
option off. This can be reversed at compile time. (see
xanim_config.h).
In each SubMenu, the options can be run together with no
intervening spaces. In the list of SubMenu options presented
below, the first letter given is the letter that specifies
the SubMenu and should NOT be repeated if several SubMenu
options are to be run together.
For example, "+Cn +Cs10 +CF4" can also be written as
"+Cns10F4" or "+CF4s10n".
A + or a - within a SubMenu will be an exit from that
submenu. Options will affect all animations following the
invocation of that option. Some options may be changed in
between animations without affecting previous animations.
In the following sections, an num represents an integer
number and an fnum represents a floating point number. If a
floating point number is of an integer amount, the . need
not be specified. There should be no spaces between the
option and the numbers.
aopts SubMenu for Audio Options
+ADdev AIX Only. Specify audio device. Default is
/dev/paud0/1 . Another common audio device is
/dev/acpa0/1 . For example: "+AD/dev/acpa0/1".
+Ae Audio Enable. XAnim will ignore audio data if
this option is not used.
+Ak This option allows XAnim to skip video frames
in order to help keep video in sync with audio.
default is on.
+Asfnum Scale Audio playback speed by "fnum". Only the
range 0.125 to 8.00 is allowed.
+Apnum This turns a hardware specific Audio port on or
off. The default port is selectable in
xanim_config.h. It's shipped with internal
speaker as default.
0 - internal speaker
1 - headphones or external speaker
2 - line out
+Avnum Sets the inital Audio Volume(0-255) with 0 the
lowest. default is 100.
copts SubMenu for Color Options
+C1 Create a colormap from the first frame of a
TrueColor anim and then remap the remaining
frames to this colormap. This can potentially
add significant time to the startup of an
animation but usually results in better colors.
The animation needs to be buffered for this
option to work. Not valid for TrueColor or
DirectColor displays(nor is it needed).
+C3 Convert TrueColor anims to 332(StaticColor).
TrueColor anims are animations that provide
separate RGB info for each pixel, rather than
each pixel being an index into a global
colormap. AVI(16bit CRAM), QT(RPZA and RLE
depth 16 and 24) and URT RLE 24 bit anims are
examples of TrueColor anims. This option is
ignored for TrueColor or DirectColor displays.
+CA Create a colormap from each frame of a
TrueColor anim. This can be useful if the
colors radically change during the course of
the animation. This can take a VERY,VERY long
time at start up. Animation must be buffered.
This option is ignored for TrueColor or
DirectColor displays.
+Ca Remap all images to single new cmap created
from all of the colormaps.
+Cd Use Floyd-Steinberg dithering if needed for
non-monochrome displays. This will cause a
reduction in playback speed.
+Cf Forcibly remap to all frames to 1st frame's
cmap.
+CF0 Disables +CF4.
+CF4 This option samples the colors of true color
animations ahead of time and forms a color
lookup table. Beats the just truncating to a
RGB 332 color table and IMHO beats dithering.
See the +s option below(also in copts submenu).
NOTE: this is now on by default.
+Cg Convert TrueColor anims to gray scale. This
option is ignored for TrueColor and DirectColor
displays.
+Ch Use histogram to aid in color reduction.
Histrogramming is only done on frames that are
buffered.
+Cm This option is currently needed if you want to
dither TrueColor anims to a 332 colormap.
Animation must be buffered. Typically +bC3dm is
the option to use. This can take a VERY long
time at start up.
+Cn Don't create new colormap but instead allocate
colors from the X11 Display's default cmap.
+Csnum This is the number of frames the +CF4 option
looks at ahead of time. More frames potentially
yields better colors results, but takes more
time at start up. default is 5.
gopts SubMenu for Gamma Options
+Gafnum Set gamma of animation to be displayed.
+Gdfnum Set gamma of display. 1.0 is no change. gamma's
greater than 1.0 typically brighten the
animation.
mopts SubMenu for Median-Cut Quantization Options
+Ma compute box color from average of box.
+Mc compute box color as center of box.
+Mbnum Truncate rgb to num bits before quantizing.
sopts SubMenu for Scaling Options
+Si Half the height of IFF anims if they are
interlaced.(Not completely reliable since not
all IFF anims correctly identify themselves as
interlaced).
+Sn Prevents X11 window from resizing to match
animations's size.
+Sr Allow user to resize animation on the fly.
Enlarging an animation can greatly reduce
playback speed depending on the power of the
cpu.
+Ssfnum Scale the size of animation by fnum before
displaying.
+Shfnum Scale the horizontal size of the animation by
fnum before displaying.
+Svfnum Scale the vertical size of the animation by
fnum before displaying.
+Sxnum Scale the animation to have width num before
displaying.
+Synum Scale the animation to have height num before
displaying.
+Sc Copy display scaling factors to display
buffering factors.
+SSfnum Scale the size of the animation by fnum before
buffering it.
+SHfnum Scale the horizontal size of the animation by
fnum before buffering it.
+SVfnum Scale the vertical size of the animation by
fnum before buffering it.
+SXnum Scale the animation to have width num before
buffering it.
+SYnum Scale the animation to have height num before
buffering it.
+SC Copy buffer scaling factors to display scaling
factors.
zopts SubMenu for Special Options
+Ze XAnim will exit after playing through command
line once.
+Zpnum XAnim pause at frame num and then wait for user
input. Several pauses may be specified. Each
group of pauses will only affect the animation
immediately following them on the command line.
Pauses will occur at least once.
+Zr This option enables the Remote Control Window.
This overrides the default condition set in
xanim_config.h. Remote Control support must be
compiled into XAnim for this to work.
Normal Options
+b Uncompress and buffer images before displaying.
This only applies to AVI, QT, IFF, FLI, FLC,
JPEG, MPEG and DL animations. The rest(GIF87a,
GIF89a, PFX and RLE) are currently always
uncompressed and buffered. This is cleared by
the +f option.
+B Used X11 Shared Memory(if present) for
unbuffered animations only.(This is mutually
exclusive with +b above).
+f Don't load anim into memory, but read each
section only when needed. This is supported
only for AVI, QT, IFF, FLI, FLC, JPEG, MPEG and
DL animations. This option is cleared by the +b
option. This saves memory at the cost of
speed.
+c let xanim know that iff anim is a nonlooping
one.
+dnum debug switch. num can be from 0(off) to 5(most)
for level of detail.
+F Floyd-Steinberg dithering when needed.
+jnum num is the number of milliseconds between
frames. if 0 then the time specified in the
animation is used for timing purposes.
+lnum loop animation num number of times before
moving on to next animation.
+lpnum ping-pong animation num number of times before
moving on to next animation.
+N don't display images. Useful for benchmarking.
+o turns on certain optimizations. See
xanim.readme.
+p Use Pixmap instead of Image in X11. This option
has no effect if the animation is
buffered(either by default or with the +b
option).
+q Prevents XAnim from printing out the title
header. Useful for when XAnim is called by
other programs where no tty output is
desired(doesn't affect +v or +d# options).
+r Allow color cycling for IFF single images.
+R Allow color cycling for IFF anims. (default
should be off)
+T0 Title option 0. Title is just XAnim.
+T1 Title option 1. Title is current anim name.
When anim is stopped, the current frame number
is included.
+T2 Title option 2. Title is current anim name and
current frame number.
+v Verbose mode. Gives some information about
animation such as size, number of frames, etc.
+Vnum Select X11 Visual to use when displaying
animation. The num is obtained by using the +X
option of xanim.
+Vclass Select the best X11 Visual of Class class when
displaying the animation. class can be anyone
of the following strings and is case
insensitive. (ie StaTicGraY is same as
staticgray).
staticgray Select best StaticGray Visual.
grayscale Select best GrayScale Visual.
staticcolor Select best StaticColor Visual.
pseudocolor Select best PseudoColor Visual.
truecolor Select best TrueColor Visual.
directcolor Select best DirectColor Visual.
+X X11 verbose mode. Display information about the
support X11 visuals.
WINDOW COMMANDS
Once the animation is up and running there are various
commands that can be entered into that animation window from
the keyboard.
q quit.
Q Quit.
g Stop color cycling.
r Restore original Colors(useful after g).
w Restore original window size(useful after
resizing).
z This pops up or removes the Remote Control Window.
Remote Control support must be compiled into XAnim
for this to work.
<space> Toggle. starts/stops animation.
, Single step back one frame.
. Single step forward one frame.
< Go back to start of previous anim.
> Go forward to start of next anim.
m Single step back one frame staying within anim.
/ Single step forward one frame staying within anim.
- Increase animation playback speed.
= Decrease animation playback speed.
0 Reset animation playback speed to original values.
AUDIO RELATED WINDOW COMMANDS
1 Decrement volume by 10.
2 Decrement volume by 1.
3 Increment volume by 1.
4 Increment volume by 10.
s Toggle. Audio Volume(MUTE). on/off.
8 Toggle. Main Speaker. on/off.
9 Toggle. Headphones. on/off.
MOUSE BUTTONS
Once the animation is up and running the mouse buttons have
the following functions.
<Left_Button>
Single step back one frame.
<Middle_Button>
Toggle. starts/stops animation.
<Right_Button>
Single step forward one frame.
BUFFERING, PIXMAPS and READ_FROM_FILE Options
XAnim by default will read the entire animation into memory.
PFX, Moviesetter, GIF or URT RLE type animations are always
uncompressed and stored in memory as individual images.
For the AVI, QT, IFF, FLI/FLC, JPEG, MPEG and DL animations,
only the compressed delta is stored. These deltas are then
uncompressed each time they need to be displayed. The buffer
option(+b) may be used to potentially speed up playback by
uncompressing and storing these images ahead of time. But
more memory is used up in the process.
When an XPutImage is called, the image typically gets copied
twice, once to memory and then from there onto the display.
A pixmap is directly copied onto the display without the
first copy. This is why it is sometimes much faster to use
the pixmap option(+p). Each image isn't converted into a
pixmap until the first time it is displayed. This is why the
first loop of an animation using this option is sometimes
slower than subsequent loops. While the pixmap option may
improve playback speed, it will slow things down if on-the-
fly scaling needs to be performed. This is because XAnim no
longer has direct access to the image and needs to get a
copy of it before it can be scaled.
The read from file option(+f) causes XAnim not to store the
compressed deltas in memory. Instead as each image is to be
displayed, XAnim reads the corresponding compressed delta
from the file, expands it and then displays it. While this
can dramatically cut down on memory usage, the necessary
reads from disk(or whatever) can slow down playback speed.
XAnim still needs to allocate one to three image buffers
depending on the type of animation and the scaling options
used. This option is only supported for AVI, QT, FLI/FLC,
IFF, JPEG, MPEG and DL animations. The BODY chunk of IFF
animations is not included in this. As a result, an IFF
animation that is made up of several BODY chunks will not
currently benefit from this option.
SCALING Options
There are two sets of scaling options. One set, the display
scaling factors, affects the size of the animation as it is
displayed. The other set, the buffer scaling factors, affect
the size of the images as they are stored in
memory(buffered). The buffer scaling factors only affect
animations that are buffered and can greatly increase or
decrease memory usage.
These two sets are completely independent of each other. You
can set the buffer scaling factors to 20 times the normal
animation size and not affect the size at which that
animation is displayed. The images are stored at 20 times
the normal size(and at 400 times the memory usage), but then
get scaled back down to normal size before being displayed.
NOTE: that an animation must be buffered in order for the
buffer scaling factors to have any affect on it. The display
scaling factors affect all animations.
You can create pixellation like affects by buffering the
animation at 1/8 it's normal size, but keeping the display
scaling factors at the original size. (IE "xanim +bSS0.125
anim.anim").
Many times it's faster to store and display an animation
with large dimensions at half-size. The option "+bSS0.5C" or
"+bSS0.5s0.5" both will accomplish this. To save memory, you
could even store the animation at half size and yet display
it at full size. "+bSS0.5" will accomplish this.
FORWARDS, BACKWARDS and OPTIMIZATION.
Many type of animations(FLI/FLC/IFF/some AVI and QTs) are
compressed with forward playback in mind only. Each delta
only stores the difference between the current frame and the
previous frame. As a results, most of these animations don't
display correctly when played backwards. Even when buffered
up, these may not work, since XAnim only stores the smallest
rectangle that encompasses the changes from the previous
frame. You can force XAnim to store the entire frame by
specifying the "-o" option to turn this optimization off.
This will most likely use more memory and slow down the
animation, since more of the image needs to be stored and/or
displayed.
COLOR OPTIONS
Most of this will be a TBD for a future rev and what's here
might be sketchy, incomplete or just plain confusing.
TrueColor and DirectColor displays don't need to worry about
most of these options, as the animations can be displayed in
their original colors(ignoring monitor variations etc).
However, TrueColor and DirectColor displays can't display
animations that employ color cycling techniques where the
colormap changes from frame to frame. DirectColor could
potentially support this, but not TrueColor.
For the rest of the displays, the problem becomes matching
the colors in the animations to the available colors of the
Display. For most PseudoColor displays this means 256
colors. Many of which are already in use by various other
programs. XAnim defaults to creating it's own colormap and
using all the colors from that. The window manager then
installs this new colormap, whenever the mouse pointer is
inside the XAnim animation window(Sometimes a specific
action is required to change the ColorMap Focus, like
clicking in the window or pressing a specific key). In any
case, this action usually causes all the other colors on the
screen to be temporarily "messed-up" until the mouse is
moved out of the animation window. The alternative, is to
use the "+Cn" option. Now XAnim tries allocating all the
colors it needs from the current colormap. If it can't get a
certain color, then XAnim choose one that is "close" to this
certain color. Close is completely arbitrary. The animation
is now displayed in colors that are different than the
original colors. This difference may or may not be
noticeable.
Another big problem is when the animations are what I called
TrueColor animations. Where each pixel is stored as RGB
triplets. For example, AVI 16 bit CRAM animations. Each
pixel has 5 bits of Red, 5 bits of Green and 5 bits of Blue
info associated with it. This means there can be up to 32768
unique colors in each image. And on most PseudoColor
displays we can only display 256 unique colors. Beside
getting better displays, what can we do? XAnim defaults to
truncating the RGB information from 555 to 332. That is to 3
bits of Red, 3 bits of Green and 2 bits of Blue. Less on
Blue because the human eye is more sensitive to Red and
Green than Blue. This 332 colormap happens to be 256 colors
in size, which nicely fits in with our display. If our
display only had 64 colors, then XAnim is smart enough to
truncate things down to 222. Now the problem is the colors
of the displayed anim are noticeably different than the
original colors. Typically you can see color banding etc.
While this is fine to get a feel for the animation, we can
do better. One of the solutions XAnim currently offers is
the "+bC1" option. What this does is choose the the best 256
colors from the first image of the animation. Then each
pixel of each subsequent image is remapped to one of these
256 colors. This takes up some CPU time up front and more
memory since each image needs to be buffered, but results in
a colors that are closer to the originals. Another option,
"+bCA", chooses the best 256 from each image, then 256
colors from all these colormaps are chosen as the final
colormap. This is useful if the colors in the first image
aren't representative of the rest of the animation. This can
be very slow. Another option that is supported, but not
really optimized for yet is "+bC3dm". This causes XAnim to
use a 332 colormap and then apply a Floyd-Steinberg dither
algorithm to each image. Currently this is very slow.
Different dithers(like Ordered) and better optimizations
might speed this up in future revs. In general, handling of
TrueColor animations in XAnim needs to be improved.
Another scenario where colors need to be remapped, is when
several images or animations with different colormaps need
to be displayed. Changing the colormap usually results in
an annoying flicker. One solution to this is to remap all of
the images/animations to the same colormap. The "+Ca" option
chooses the best colors from all the colormaps and then
remaps all the images to it. The "+Cf" option, simply remaps
everything to the first colormap. The "+Ch" option is
useful when an animation's colormap specifies a lot of
colors that aren't used. XAnim looks through each buffered
image of the animation and makes a histogram of the useage
of each color. This information is then used to weedout
unused or rarely used colors.
QUICKTIME ANIMATIONS
Quicktime animations are usually stored in two separate
files. One is call a data fork and ends with a ".data". The
other is a resource fork and ends in a ".rsrc". Sometimes
these animations are in a "flattened/merged fork" format,
where everything is put into one file. There's no standard
naming format for these types of files, although usually .qt
or .mov is used.
For example, if you have a quicktime animation made up of
two files named: "spin.rsrc" and "spin.data", you can
display them using Xanim with either of the following
commands "xanim spin" or "xanim spin.rsrc". XAnim is smart
enough to add/modfiy the ".rsrc" and ".data" endings as
needed.
If you use AUFS from the Columbia Appletalk Package, then
Macintosh files have their data fork stored in the expected
place, and the resource fork is in a file with the same name
in a .resource subdirectory. Therefore, if the data fork is
in "spin", and the resource fork is in ".resource/spin", the
movie can be displayed with "xanim spin".
For "flattened/merged_fork" quicktime animations, you need
to specify the entire file name.
NOTE: XAnim doesn't support 100% of the quicktime format.
AUTHOR
Mark Podlipec
podlipec@wellfleet.com
podlipec@shell.portal.com
http://www.portal.com/~podlipec/home.html "The XAnim Home
Page"