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What It Is

XAnim is a program for playing a wide variety of animation, video and audio formats under X11. It was written mainly for machines running unix(or a unix derivatives), but can also be compiled and run on VAX VMS machines(although without audio support). It has also been ported to the Amiga and to W95/NT.

What It Does

X11 Support
Audio Support
File Formats and Codecs
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XAnim X11 Support

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).

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XAnim Audio Support

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.

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.

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Supported Formats and Codecs

Below is a list of codecs supported by XAnim Revision 2.80.0.

Please note that most formats can support a large number of different compression/encoding styles. And new ones are coming out all the time. So while XAnim supports the AVI Format, it doesn't yet support all the various video and audio codecs that can be used inside an AVI file. Usually the reason I can't support a particular video codec is because the company that owns that codec will not allow it.

Also note, that sometimes the same video codec is listed several times with different depths. This is because at differents depths, the encoding technique is suffciently different to warrant a unique set of routines. The term depth being the number of bits per pixel after decompression and is in no way related to the X11 Display depth.

*
DVI ADPCM format has two implementations. The old way and the new way. Unfortunately, it is impossible for a software program to distinguish between the two. If it sounds bad, use the +k2 option to tell XAnim to use the Old DVI ADPCM Format. k is for kludge by the way.

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