Thanks very much for this response. ffmpeg looks very useful to me, I am checking it out right now. It is unclear to me what the overlap is with mplayer/mencoder. It seems that ffmpeg is somewhat leaner and more portable, so I am thinking of using it as the encoder for your first suggestion (create a sequence of jpegs with the tachyon raytracer, then convert to mp4). ffmpeg seems quite fast to me compared to using imagemagick with GIFs.
Cheers, Marshall Hampton On Sep 1, 11:47 am, Vincent Beffara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thanks Vincent for the information. One reason I am choosing not to > > use povray is the license, which I believe is not compatible with > > inclusion in Sage. > > Ah. I didn't know about the license, I had a look and indeed it is not > quite free enough. BTW I am not pushing povray as such, simply saying > that a way to export a plot into some scene description language is > doable with minimal, or at least reasonable, work. > > > Btw, the tachyon raytracer does seem to have good multicore support dy > > default. Unfortunately it cannot animate. I wish we had someone who > > could add that ability - to be clear, I think we need good movie > > format in terms of compression and multiplatform support. Animating > > GIFs is well supported but too clunky for longer animations. > > In terms of compression, nothing will beat a script for the raytracer du > jour, but that's not quite an animation format. In terms of movies, > there are a few cross-platform possibilities but if you want to be > really careful you will have to look into patents this time ... A few > believable possibilities : > > - Integrate mencoder/mplayer, or at least one agreed-upon codec. Use a > raytracer to generate frames, via a script, encode that into video, > play the video. Except that embedding video into a web page (such as > the notebook) in a cross-platform way is a pain where you guess - > although mp4/h264 works in many places. If you only want movies to > play on machines where Sage is installed, then mplayer (or VLC) really > should be cross-platform - but it breaks the whole notebook way. > > - Integrate something likeffmpeg, encode to flash .flv, and rely on the > presence of flash player. That's even less cross-platform, but on the > other hand flash is installed wherever it can be. > > - Look for / write some kind of animation description format and a > real-time player using OpenGL, that is cross-platform. Or maybe a java > applet. That's the only way to get some interactivity, but if it > doesn't exist yet it quite a bit of work. > > /v > > -- > Vincent Beffara > UMPA - ENS Lyon > 46 Allée d'Italie > 69364 LYON cedex 07 > Tel: 04 72 72 85 25 > Fax: 04 72 72 84 80 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
