Not exactly like the output to Jpg thing for sure, saving space does have
it's advantages when making animations but I wonder if the feasibilty is
relevant enough considering multi-gigabyte hard disks these days.
Although it was only a year ago I was finding myself struggling with little
room to manuever with a total of 8 GB and 150 MB free (my fault, I was
doubling and triplicating files on other partitions and second HD in case of
potential data loss of course, no backup hardware).
I don't see the idea as being a bad one, just not real important unless the
animation were to be very large, say 1000 frames at 640x480 res. making
somewhere around 1400 MB I think.
Something to consider would be the added rendering time due to the ever
growing Mpg file being appended to with each access causing a delay (always
increasing delay at that possibly).

Bob

Peter Santo <spa### [at] exawebde> wrote in message
news:38141F91.C71A9963@exaweb.de...
> Maybe many of the readers have the same problem I have: disk space. As
> far as I understand the mpeg standard it should be possible to generate
> mpeg output directly from pov, without having to store every one and
> single frame of an animaton on disk before compressing.
>
> Here is the idea:
>
> - Tell povray the sequence scheme of I/P/B frames.
>
> - Write single frames into files (e.g. ppm)
>
> - Every time an I-frame is generated, compress the last I-to-I sequence,
> append it to the mpeg file, generate a valid mpeg header and delete the
> uncompressed images.
>
>
> Of course, one could do this without modifying Povray:
>
> - Generate a Povray INI file depending on the I/P/B scheme.
>
> - Shell out from the Povray animation loop after every I-frame has
> finished rendering and call a program that does the same as descibed
> above.
>
>
> That way you would only have to store a few uncompressed images (e.g. 10
> if you use IBBPBBPBBI). I am not volunteering for writing such a program
> or asking anyone to do so. I would just like to get some comments, if
> you think this would work and/or be a good idea to do.
>
> /PETER/
>
> --
> Peter Santo (PUMP development)
> HP: http://www.exaweb.de
> > Ever heard of .cshrc?
> That's a city in Bosnia.  Right?

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