XAnim For Linux

XAnim project is a program for playing a wide variety of animation, audio and video formats on unix X11 machines.

I attempt to reply to all the email messages I receive, however, I get quite a few with invalid return addresses. If you don't hear from me within a week, double check that your return address is correct.

XAnim supports the majority of the common X11 Visuals. It supports all depths that have a bpp of 1, 8, 16 and 32. Other bpp's are non-standard(although they are legal). NOTE: that the depth indicates how many bits are used to specify the color of a pixel and the bpp indicates how many bits each pixel consumes in memory. For example, a depth 24 Visual usually has a 32 bpp uses 24 bits to specify the color and 8 bits of padding per pixel.

Since I optimize each video decompression routine(currently over sixty of them) for each bpp, it's a lot of work when someone decides to use a "non-standard" bpp. Especially when the bpp doesn't have a correspondingly sized variable(like bytes for depth 8 or shorts for depth 16). This is why bpp 24 is not yet supported.

XAnim also supports X11 shared memory. This can greatly speed up the drawing of images on most X11 servers by eliminating the need for the X11 server to copy the image *before* writing the image to the display memory. NOTE: X11 shared memory isn't possible when you are using a remote display(ie: you are running on one machine and sending the display to another).

Unix doesn't have anything even remotely resembling an audio standard or API. This means separate and unique code must be written for each OS/machine combination that is to be supported.

Below is a list of the currently support platforms. If you have a platform that isn't currently supported and you would like to help write the code for it, let me know and I can provide you with some assistance, etc.

� Linux x86 platforms. � NetBSD x86 platforms. � BSDI x86 platforms. � FreeBSD x86 platforms. � SGI workstations(Indy, Indigo, etc). � DEC workstations running MMS(Multimedia Services). � Sun Solaris/SunOS Sparc/68K/x86 workstations. � HP workstation running HP's Aserver. � HP workstation direct audio device. � Sony NEWS 5000 series workstations. � QNX 4.2 x86 platforms. � NEC EWS workstations. � IBM AIX 4.1 workstations. � Any machine running AudioFile(AF). � Any machine running Net Audio Server(NAS).

Some time this year I plan on revamping the audio device section of XAnim to allow multiple audio devices to be compiled in at once. For example if you have a Solaris Sparc platform, you could then compile in support for the native audio device and NAS at the same time. That way you could use the same xanim executable depending on whether the machine you're on is running NAS or not.

The reason I bring this up is because I suspect I will probably break things left and right for a while and since I don't have access to the majority of these platforms, I won't be able to test them out before releasing. In any case, when the time comes, I'll give plenty of warning and will leave the old release around.