Welcome!

About EasyBMPtoAVI Movie Creator

EasyBMPtoAVI Movie Creator is a cross-platform application that converts a series of windows bitmap (BMP) images to an AVI movie file. Currently, EasyBMPtoAVI Movie Creator is supported on both little-endian (e.g., x86) and bit-endian (e.g., PowerPC, Sparc) machines on any platform (e.g., Windows XP, Sun Solaris, Unix, Linux, Mac OSX). Scientists may find this software particularly useful for creating animated visualizations from series of still images.

EasyBMPtoAVI Movie Creator provides a simple command line interface (CLI) that is consistent across platforms, and it interactively quizzes the user if any necessary information is missing. EasyBMPtoAVI Movie Creator is being designed with ease of use as a top goal. To that end, a graphical user interface (GUI) is planned for a future release.

The EasyBMPtoAVI project was first begun on SourceForge on May 19, 2006.

Input Images

The input images can be of any bit depth (currently, 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, and 32-bpp), and are specified either sequentially

(frame000.bmp, frame001.bmp, frame003.bmp, ...)

or in a list of input files.

Output Movie

The output is an uncompressed, 24-bpp RGB movie in the AVI format. Currently, movies are limited to 2GB in size, which generally is not an obstacle for scientific visualizations. If the demand is there, the project may implement the AVI 2.0 standard, which circumvents this limitation.

Recent News

Version 0.55 Released!

11-12-2006

Version 0.55 adds two major new features:

1. Specifying the input filename increment: Using the -increment N flag, the input filenames can be incremented by N instead of 1. e.g., use -increment 5 for a sequence of files like

   file000.bmp, file005.bmp, file010.bmp, ...

2. Input image rescaling: Using the -rescale ≶mode><size> flag, you can recale the input images to a desired size as the movie is generated. Please see the release notes for further information, or the supplied readme.txt file.

Other changes include an improved makefile, as well as better optimizations in the pre-compiled version.

Two New Features Added

8-9-2006

Version 0.54 adds two relatively major new features: non-integral framerates (e.g., NTSC 29.97) and (temporal) smoothing by interpolation of adjacent frames. The latter feature should help low-framerate movies look a little nicer.

In addition, experimental interleaving has been added. Using this option, adjacent frames are interleaved, rather than interpolated. This alternate form of temporal smoothing runs a bit faster.

Big-endian architectures now supported!

5-24-2006

As of Version 0.52, EasyBMPtoAVI Movie Creator now supports big-endian architectures. In particular, this means that people using PowerPC-based Macintoshes should be just fine, and a major cross-architectural goal has been achieved for the project.

As the core functionality continues to improve, we may start to turn our attention towards a graphical user interface (GUI). Stay tuned! :-)