XAnim(1)XAnim(1)NAMExanim - multiformat animation/video/audio viewer for X
SYNOPSISxanim [ +Vnum ] [ +Aaopts ] [ +Ccopts ] [ +Ggopts ] [ +Mmopts ] [
+Ssopts ] [ +Wwopts ] [ +Zzopts ] [ +opts ] animfile [ [ +opts ]
[ animfile ] ... ]
DESCRIPTION
XAnim is a program that can display animation/video/audio files of var‐
ious formats on systems running X11. XAnim currently supports the fol‐
lowing animation types:
+ FLI animations.
+ FLC animations.
+ IFF animations. The following features are supported:
+ GIF87a and GIF89a files.
+ 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.
+ Quicktime Animations.
+ SGI Movie Format Files.
+ 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.
+ AU 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.
+ JFIF images. NOTE: use XV for single images. This is more for
animation of a sequence of JPEG images.
+ MPEG animations. NOT FULLY SUPPORTED. NO AUDIO. And currently
only Type I Frames are displayed. Type B and Type P frames
are currently ignored, but will be added in future revs. It
also doesn't handle MPEGs with audio streams.
+ any combination of the above on the same command line.
+ See the file "Formats.doc" for specific support details for
each format.
NOTE_1:
Please read the "README.dll", "README.zlib",
"cinepak.readme", "indeo.readme" and "creative.readme" files
XAnim also provides various options that allow the user to alter col‐
ormaps, playback speeds, looping modes and can provide on-the-fly scal‐
ing 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 let‐
ter 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.
+Am Take the audio from the next audio-only file and use it
with the video file previous to it. Any audio already
existing in that video file will be discarded. NOTE:
XAnim by default will add audio from an audio-only file
to a previous video only(ie not audio) file. This option
just forces the issue if the previous file already has
audio.
+AM Take the audio from the next audio-only file and use it
with the video file previous to it. And in addition,
scale the timing of that video file to be of the same
duration of this audio file. Any audio already existing
in that video file will be discarded.
+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.
+Asfnum Scale Audio playback speed by "fnum". Only the range
0.125 to 8.00 is allowed. NOTE: Video does not cur‐
rently scale with the audio.
0 - internal speaker
1 - headphones or external speaker
2 - line out
+Avnum Sets the inital Audio Volume(0-100) with 0 the lowest.
default is 40.
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 col‐
ormap. 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-mono‐
chrome displays. This will cause a reduction in play‐
back 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 sub‐
menu). 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 display‐
ing.
+Sc Copy display scaling factors to display buffering fac‐
tors.
+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.
wopts SubMenu for Remote Window and Control Options.
NOTE: See the file Remote_Window.doc for more details.
+Wid Specify X11 Window id of window to draw into.
+Wd Don't refresh window at end of anim.
+Wnstring
Use property string for communication. Default is
XANIM_PROPERTY
+Wp Prepare anim, but don't start playing it.
+Wr Resize X11 Window to fit anim.
+Wxnum Position anim at x coordinate num.
+Wynum Position anim at y coordinate num.
+Wc Position relative to center of anim.
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.
+Zpe XAnim will pause on the last frame of the animation.
+Zr This option pops up 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.
+Zv This option cause XAnim to exit prior to even displaying
the animation. This is useful in conjunction with the
+v option if you just want to obtain info about the ani‐
mation without actually playing it.
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 anima‐
tions only.(This is mutually exclusive with +b above).
+D Use X11 Multi Buffering (if present) to smooth anima‐
tions by double-buffering. Default is on.
+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. Use‐
ful for when XAnim is called by other programs where no
tty output is desired(doesn't affect +v or +d# options).
+root Tiles animationvideo onto X11 root screen.
+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 display‐
ing 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.
p Toggle ping pong flag for looping.
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 follow‐
ing 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 some‐
times 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 dis‐
played. NOTE: that an animation must be buffered in order for the buf‐
fer scaling factors to have any affect on it. The display scaling fac‐
tors 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 anima‐
tion 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 differ‐
ence 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 Direct‐
Color displays can't display animations that employ color cycling tech‐
niques 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 arbi‐
trary. 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 informa‐
tion 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 differ‐
ent 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. Cur‐
rently 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 solu‐
tion to this is to remap all of the images/animations to the same col‐
ormap. 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 his‐
togram 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 "flat‐
tened/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 subdirec‐
tory. 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@ici.net
http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html http://smurfland.cit.buf‐
falo.edu/xanim/home.html http://www.tm.informatik.uni-frank‐
furt.de/xanim/
4th Berkeley Distribution 21Mar99 XAnim(1)
