From: strobel@dirac.phys.washington.edu (Nicolas Strobel)
Subject: Updated MovieApp
Summary: updated "Fun_With_Movies" on archives
Keywords: movie 2.0 compatible
Organization: University of Washington
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 00:46:28 GMT


I updated David Joerg's application "Fun_With_Movies" for
2.x.  It is a intuitive package that shows a sequence of
TIFF files (and now EPS files as well) in rapid succession
with frame speed set by the user. I preferred the look and
feel of Joerg's application over the other movie package
on the archives so I made it 2.x compatible. 
	The package called MovieApp.Update.tar.Z in 
/pub/next/submissions on sonta.cc.purdue.edu and 
cs.orst.edu contains the the files you need to update the
original "Fun_With_Movies" application found in 
1.0-release/source/Fun_With_Movies.tar.Z to 2.X. Please
note that this tar update only contains the updated files--
the rest of the necessary files are found in the
Fun_With_Movies.tar.Z package.
	I found that the disksize of EPS images of my 
simulation results were about 20X *smaller* than the TIFF
images so I added the EPS capability. I include an edited
version of the README by David S. Joerg (creator of 
Fun_With_Movies).

Enjoy!
nick
strobel@dirac.phys.washington.edu


Batavia, Illinois                            August 17, 1990
Updated by NVS to read in eps files 20 Nov 91

WHAT IS THIS?
 MovieApp is a program that interactively plays movies.   By
"movie", I mean a simple linearly arranged set of bitmap im-
ages.  You can use MovieApp for all  sorts  of  purposes;  I
created  MovieApp  because  I wanted to see my favorite ray-
tracer scenes animated, with the POV, lights, or objects all
moving  around.   Unfortunately, the ray-tracing engine sup-
plied in the NeXT software distribution  wasn't  (and  still
isn't)  fast  enough  on  existing hardware to work in real-
time.  Therefore, I set up a few little programs to generate
.nff  (ray-tracer)  files,  send them through the ray-tracer
engine, and save the .tiff files.  Then MovieApp plays  back
the results, at a more reasonable speed.  Let me stress that
MovieApp itself has nothing to do with ray-tracing; it  just
stupidly plays a set of frames in order.
 MovieApp and all its source code is in the  public  domain.
Use it in any way you wish.  No rights reserved.

THE .MOVIE FORMAT
 A movie file is actually a directory.  That directory  must
have  a file suffix of ".movie".  Inside the .movie directo-
ry, there must a file named "index".  The  index  file  must
have a letter and three numbers, like this:

t 48 48 60

 That particular index file signifies a movie made up 
of tiff files with  a  frame width of 48, a frame height of 
48, with 60 frames.  Continuing this example, there must be 
60 TIFF files in the  .movie directory,  named  "0.tiff",  
"1.tiff",  and  so  on  up  to "59.tiff".  There can be any 
other files  you  want  in  the .movie directory, they will 
be ignored. If the first letter is an "e" then that means
you have eps files, with the first one named "0.eps", the
next "1.eps", etc. on up to "59.eps".
 To make the Workspace Manager acknowledge movies  as  open-
able  by MovieApp, put MovieApp in your ~/Apps directory (or
/LocalApps, or /NextApps) and tell the  Workspace  to  "Find
Applications".  A (convenient?) side-effect of doing this is
the Workspace will now treat .movie files just like any oth-
er  file,  instead of as a directory (you can still get into
the .movie directory with command-O).

[.....]

Yours in Dobbs,
David S. Joerg
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc