[Edu-sig] Re: VPython

[Kirby Urner]

On linux, I generate .tga files from povray, and make them into a movie
using mencoder, which comes with mplayer (the "do everything" media player
out of Hungary).  

On Windows, I generate .bmp files from povray, and use a free utility called
bmp2avi.exe.  

An advantage of the mencoder route is it'll compress to DivX directly (or is
it MPEG4? -- in any case a very tight/compressed format), whereas on
Windows, the .avi output files are simply huge (like 300 meg), meaning I
need to compress them further with Dr. DivX (comes out about 1.5 meg) --
proprietary and paid for.

Examples of the animations I'm doing with Python + Povray are at
ftp://www.4dsolutions.net/pub (the raw data comes from sensors strapped to
the body of a dancer, who does her moves while a numbers stream to a file --
which files I get, after cleaning, in spreadsheet format).

However, in order to view them, you have to be able to play DivX -- a codec
Windows doesn't come with natively (mplayer on linux should have no
problem).  A solution is to download the (free and open source) VLC player
from Videolan (www.videolan.org <-- .org, not .com).  This will play the
animations at my ftp site.  There's an OSX version of VLC too I think.

Kirby

> -----Original Message-----
> From: edu-sig-bounces at python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces at python.org] On
> Behalf Of David Handy
> Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 9:47 AM
> To: Kirby Urner
> Cc: edu-sig at python.org
> Subject: RE: [Edu-sig] Re: VPython
> 
> On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Kirby Urner wrote:
> 
> > I'm
> > automating animations, doing 270-300 frames over a few hours, with
> Python
> > generating the povray .inc files from a spreadsheet (where the bulk of
> the
> > information is saved).
> 
> That sounds so cool! What program are you using to put the frames together
> into a movie? What is the final file format?
> 
> 
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