Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Q: Why are the output AVI movie files so large?

   A: Because our philosophy is to never degrade quality and to leave compression choices to the user, EasyBMPtoAVI generates uncompressed AVI movies. Therefore, to reduce your file size, you'll need to compress your movie with a codec. Please see the links page for a list of good utilities for compressing AVI movies.

2. Q: My input images were 4-bpp (or 1-, 8-, or 16-bpp) images. Why does the output movie use the less-optimal 24-bpp format?

   A: For the sake of more rapid development with fewer bugs, we chose to use 24-bpp frames. In particular, this eliminates the complexity of palettes and the like. A future release may allow the use of lower bit-rate output movie frames.

3. Q: The output movie file size is limited to 2GB. Why?

   A: The original AVI file specification allowed for file sizes up to 2 GB. This is not a limitation for everyday use, and using the simpler specification aided in development and debugging. However, a future release may implement the AVI 2.0 (OpenDML) specification to circumvent this limitation. Another potential fix may be to split the output into multiple, sub-2GB parts.

4. Q: I used EasyBMPtoAVI on a Macintosh with a PowerPC chip (or on another big-endian machine), and the output was unreadable or corrupted. Why?

   A: Early Versions of EasyBMPtoAVI did not support big-endian architectures. However, our software now fully supports both little- and big-endian architectures as of Version 0.52. So, to solve this issue, please download the most recent version of our software.

5. Q: I get strange warnings when compiling with Microsoft Visual Studio. Are they serious?

   A: You may encounter strange warnings about deprecated functions like fopen and sprintf, or warning C6031 or C4996, with suggestions regarding _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRACATE. We are looking into these warnings, but they do not appear to be serious, and code compiles and runs fine in Visual Studio. Future releases will work towards eliminating all these warnings.