From: Dirk Walther [walther@caltech.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 3:48 PM
To: Edgington, Duane; Danelle Cline
Subject: mpeg encoding


Hi guys

I just found a really good way to make movies for our demo. Duane, do you
remember our attempts of using mpeg_encode? It looked terrible, especially
the image quality. Well, with someone here I have found the best way to do
it for us - by using MPEG's run-length compressing scheme without
sacrificing image quality. The parameter file to do that is attached. The
clips have visually the same quality as the quicktime movies we've made so
far, but they are much smaller, e.g. 4.3 MB instead of 63 MB for a 300
frame clip. They play with mpeg_play under Linux and Qicktime player under
Windows - less jerking now, because the clip fits easily into the memory.

Another trick that I have discovered: When you have a bunch of .ppm frames
that you want to watch as a video, try: xv -wait 0 -wloop frame*.ppm

Best

Dirk

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dirk Walther                        \_|_/     phone: ++1-626-395-2878
Computation and Neural Systems      /= =\       fax: ++1-626-796-8876
California Institute of Technology (-O-O-)
mail code 139-74                    \ v /  email: walther@caltech.edu
Beckman Institute 12A                \_/            D.Walther@gmx.net