Re: [VANILLA-LIST:3160] Developers Must Play

[Tom Holub <doosh@best.com>]

On Thu, May 11, 2000 at 12:11:10AM -0400, Karthik Arumugham wrote:
> On Wed, 10 May 2000, Tom Holub wrote:
> 
> > I would expect netrek movies to compress extremely well; 95% of the pixels
> > are the same from frame to frame.
> >  -Tom
> 
> I'm wondering if we can actually find a standard codec to do this well,
> without resorting to gzipping the results.
> 
> Anyways, I think animated gifs are supported by more browsers... Also,
> Adrian Moore took my 2mb gif and used a utility from
> http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gifcon.html#download to shrink it down
> to 607k (up as Supercompressed_agridrop.gif). This program doesn't seem to
> be free though, and is Windows only.

We probably want to use png as a model, and perhaps libpng. 
I did an xwd and made a GIF out of it and it came out to 600K
(and took 6 real seconds on a PII/300).  Then I turned it into a png
and it was 18K.

> But having an easy way to make short clips would be great for tutorials or
> perhaps for team websites (maybe people will have an incentive to actually
> make a team site if they can stick up all their cool plays from the
> season).

Being able to make short clips would be great.  I just question whether
forking a process on a per-frame basis is an intelligent way to do
it.
 -Tom