On Tue, 26 Oct 1999 01:26:27 -0700, Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:

>  I brought this up a few months ago when I found out that the Mac
>version of POV-Ray had built in animation support. It seems that
>the way the the apple quick time support is so deeply associated
>with the Macintosh platform it was an easy task to write into the
>Mac POV-Ray interface.

I liked the idea back then and I still support it. AVI is as much
incorporated into windoze as is QT in MacOS so it shouldn't be
impossible, rather far from it.

<snip>

>  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. 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 ?

Do like DTA does. It does a quiery to the OS and gets the available
codecs, then the user can choose any of the ones available. And
windoze is pretty good at managing unknown codecs, downloading them
from the net and automatically installing them. Bink and Smacker are a
different story.

>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.

There's always work. Let's not forget that Chris has a lot of work
beside supporting the windoze version. And then there's RL, too...

I will ask my VC guru what has to be done and (chances tend to zero!)
would he do it if it's not much work. This would eventually be an
unofficial version, which of course has its drawbacks. I promise
nothing, mind you.


Peter Popov
ICQ: 15002700

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