Animator is a new video player on Atari. New, but its developement started quite a long time ago and a lot of work has already been spent to get it as it is now.
Animator can render AVI (Video for Windows) files with sound, MOV (Apple Quicktime) files without sound and FLI and FLC (Autodesk Animator) files. It also can play WAV sound files (Microsoft).
If you have any suggestion or comments, the authors are reachable through email:
Animator is a multimedia player. this means that it can display movie files on the screen with synchronized sound. Of course, Animator also can play sound files and videos without sound.
One of the most interesting question about Animator is... Its speed! So? is Animator fast? Well, I just let you proceed to some test and make up your mind about it. But, if you find a movie file and a hardware configuration that allows some other player to be faster, tell me. I'm intrested. The point is not that my player is always the fastest, but this helps me understanding where are the weak points of my player.
What kind of movie files Animator can render? Well, here are the supported file formats and restrictions:
You can see that there are many restrictions, but they are here just to give you an idea of what you're going to find in the future releases! Animator can also display still images. This feature is not used for the moment, but we'll take advantage of it in the future.
You may now ask what hardware is supported. Well, in general, every 16 bits video display is supported as long as the EdDI cookie is present, and it's the case if you're using NVDI. If your video system is not the Falcon's videl, you just have to switch to a large enough 16 bits resolution by yourself.
If you don't have the EdDI cookie set, or if it's an old EdDI version, Animator guesses your video display parameters, using the most reasonable information available.
Animator was successfully tested with the following hardware:
Just note that for the moment, Animator looks for the best 16 bits video resolution available only on Falcon using the original Videl chip. When the current resolution is already 16 bits wide, Animator just keep it like this. That's why if you have a graphic card, you should first switch your display to a large enough 16 bits resolution.
Aniator may also be able to play sound on STe in the future, but for the moment it still uses many 68020 specific instructions. So this is for a future release. It is not really a priority for the moment (unless you ask me for such a feature, of course!).
Animator was successifully tested on the following systems:
I'm sorry that you must use NVDI under Magic, but I didn't had time to find a workaround to a vicious bug of Magic screen driver (may have disapeared with release 6.22 ; not tested). Everything is fine with the one of NVDI. I would be very pleased to discuss that problem with Magic authors, but I didn't even try because I'm not sure they would listen to me... If you have their mail address, please tell me (see my mail address below).
To finish that presentation of this player, here is a list of technologies that you can find in Animator, just to give you an idea of what it is to design such a software:
Animator uses a command line system. It's the way you can customize Animator. I give you here some description of this system so that you can use it without any pain.
Anyway, the easyest way to use Animator is of couse to drop some folder or some movie file on it. Folders are recursively parsed for movie files unless you specify '-R' in the command line.
When referring to a file in the command line, wildcards '*' and '?' are also available. This some time helps.
The user interface is very basic. The mouse is just what you need to control Animator. The left button usually allows you to get to the next task and pressing the right button quits Animator.
Before playing a video, if you asked for holding the screen until a key strike ('+h' option), you can immediately quit using [Esc] or just start playing the video with any other key or the mouse left button.
When playing a video, you can only use the mouse:
Here is how you can customize Animator. Don't be afraid, you needn't know everything by heart. At most, you just need to set some switches in the dialog box when installing Animator as an application linked with AVI files.
Some general rules about arguments:
Note that the command line is parsed until Animator reaches a file that can be opened. Animator sums up the state of options for the first file on startup. If no file is found, Animator tells it to you. Flag syntax is very simple: a '+' activates a flag, a '-' disables it.
I'd like to give here some examples of case in which you may not get what you would like to.
After having presented you some tricky cases, let's see why all that stuff is powerfull.
Ok, I think that's enough for the command line system. Just remember that the most painless way to use Animator is to install it with the GEM desktop as an application linked to the AVI extension. Clicking on movie files is then the only thing you have to do. It's that easy.
Though developer documentation is not spread with Animator anymore, it is possible for you to write your own modules for Animator. These are just standards TOS programs that Animator dynamically loads when looking for a module that handles a given compression scheme.
Modules just follow some specific rules described in the modules documentation. Please refer to that document for more details (now only available on request by email). Unfortunatelly, this documentation is not translated into English yet. If you're interested in an English version of it, please let me know by email and I'll try to provide it to you as soon as possible. Keep in mind that even if the current design relies on choices that may not be the best, this may change in the future. For example, I'm thinking about moving to the LDG (GEM Dynamic Libraries http://ldg.atari.org/) format.
For the moment only two modules formats out of the planned three are designed. AVC and AAC modules are respectively Animator Video Codec modules and Animator Audio Codec modules. Codec means that they should (at best) be able to decode and encode data in a given format. But the encoding part of modules format is still not defined yet. AFH (Animator File Handler) modules are meant to handle a given file format. Their design is also planned for a future release.
By default the modules directory is near Animator executable file. Though, you can move it elsewhere in order not to have many copies of modules on your harddrive, and use the same copy of those modules in every application that uses them.
To have modules put in a given directory, you just have to copy MODPLACE near the modules directory and add the path where MODPLACE is to the PATH variable of your environment.
Example: PATH=C:\;D:\;E:\GCC;C:\ANIMATOR
Means that those files are here:
As TOS doesn't let you create environment variables, you have to use a program like Gemenv. The environment manager of Gemenv is a bit buggy but the rest is reliable and is working fine and I find it very usefull.
The use of Gemenv is simple: after having read the doc, put ROOT.ENV on the root of your boot drive (e.g.: C:\ROOT.ENV) and GEMENV.PRG in your AUTO folder. Edit C:\ROOT.ENV with GEMENV.PRG and modify the PATH line. Never change anything to ENV$ROOTSIZE and ENV$OPTIONS. Save the option file, quit and reboot.
Note that Animator doesn't mind if MODPLACE is an empty file. Anyway, please spread only the original file with Animator.
To finish with modules, you may ask why do I use such a file to locate modules. The reason is that I'm using Shell_Find() to locate modules, and this system call may only find files, not folders. Shell_Find() first looks for the given file in the current directory, then in the application directory (given by Shell_Read()) and then in the directories listed in the PATH environment variable.
Thanks to the following pepole for their help and beta tests:
Benjamin Gandon (Stabylo), March 20, 2001. Updated August 8, 2001