> > 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.
> 
>   When I made the suggestion that something similar be added to the
> Windows version of the program it fell mostly upon deaf ears and
> no one spoke up in favor of the idea except Thorsten who mentioned
> how easy it was with the Mac version.

Now this disappoints me. It's not that I'd think all my brilliant ;)
ideas should be hacked at once, but _if_ it can be done with a sensible
amount of work _and_ some users would like such a feature _and_ most
other render programs have a similar feature, then it should be taken
into account on the next wishlist, shouldn't it?

On the other hand, I really like the fact that pov, despite all it's
features, is not as bloated as many other render programs are. So if I
am sort of the only one who'd like such a feature, I could try and
program a modification of cmpeg that would do "incremental" writes. Such
a program could then be called from the shellout command of pov's
internal animation loop.

>   The only problem I can see if you tried to integrate this into
> POV-Ray across the board you might have a cross platform compatibility
> issue to resolve. Which animation format do you adopt ?  MpegI and
> MpegII, AVI, MOV, and all of the other animation formats that are
> currently available.

Hmmm, from the GNUish point of view, one should not support AVI or MOV,
since the fate (documentation and future extensions) of these formats is
in the hands of a single company. If you want a portable solution, MPEG
is the best choice IMHO, preferably MPEG2.

> Which video codecs do you support ? What happens
> like others mention if you choose the wrong frame rate and all of
> your render time goes for nothing ?

Video codecs? I think that is mostly an AVI issue, since AVI supports a
variety of compression codecs. But MPEG is pretty much standardized
AFAIK.

I do not have very detailed knowledge of the MPEG file format, but as
far as I remember it consists of a header (containing the resolution,
frame rate, DCF table, ..)  and the movie data that does not contain
information on the frame rate. So it should be trivial to write a
utility that could adjust the frame rate (and maybe other parameters
like gamma) _after_ the animation has been rendered.

I mentioned this in my first posting, where I supposed to attach a
header to the partial MPEG file after every incremental write, so the
animation would be viewable at all times during the render process. Cool
feature, hm?  ;)

> It seems there are a lot of what if's to work out before it could
> become a reality though I personaly am in favor of some form of
> built in animation support.

I agree. Maybe it's best to gather experience with a shell-out version
(external binary) first. If users like it, then that would be a reason
to put it on the povray wishlist.

/PETER/

-- 
>Ever heard of .cshrc?
That's a city in Bosnia. Right?

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