Animator is a new video player on Atari. New, but its developement started quite a long time ago and a lot of work has already been spent to get it as it is now.
Concerning video players on Atari, I think you probably already know the two stars: Aniplayer by Didier Mequignon and Mplayer by Guillaume Tello. It is more unlikely that you know Aviplayer by Seb/the Removers or Avi030 by Stghost/Sector one. Indeed, the first two are very efficient and handle an impressive amount of differents file formats whereas the two other only play AVI files, and Aviplayer even has no graphical interface.
You may think two good programs to play video files is enough, and ask yourself why we are still working on such a project. The fact is that I was not pleased of Seb's piece of code. Aviplayer was quite a mess, and before starting Animator (in 1997), I thought that it could be improved in many ways. I started writing decompression routines in 1998, and the first results were very encouraging. As Animator's file handling was not yet finished, the firsts tests were done using Aviplayer. It resulted in a huge process of improvement of Aviplayer which finally resulted in the 0.30 version, which is much closer to the what I wanted Aviplayer to be.
Then Animator's structure started beeing coded and it became a real replacement for Aviplayer, resulting in our stopping supporting Aviplayer. The fact is that the internal structure that old player could not allow us to improve it further. Going further was just the point of Animator project. Improvements in its file handling and in code sharing allow it to be much easyer to maintain and much easyer to improve and to have it extended to support new compression shemes much more easily.
As I wanted Animator to be very good (and even more, if posible !), I postponed its release until it reach version 1.0 with a pretty huge amount of features planned. Year 2000 saw the slowing down of the developpement of Animator, with many months of inactivity and only very small minor changes until August.
Easter wasn't better and finally, I was contacted in February by the webmaster of Place2be.de and translated the description of Animator's features so that he can spread a news about it. I realized that was the perfect opportunity for me to release Animator and that's how it ended up on your harddrive !
If you have any suggestion or comments we are reachable through email:
Animator can render AVI (Video for Windows) files with sound, MOV (Apple Quicktime) files without sound and FLI and FLC (Autodesk Animator) files. It also can play WAV sound files (from Microsoft).
Supported file formats:
Supported hardware are the following:
Animator supports the following systems:
There is three possibilities to use Animator:
If you want to know more about switches and possibilities of the command line, read the full documentation.
The user interface is very basic. The mouse is just about what you need to control Animator. The left button usually allows you to get to the next task and the right button lets you quit Animator.
Before playing a video, if you asked for holding the screen until a key stroke ('+h' option), you can immediately quit using [Esc] or just start playing the video with any other key or the mouse left button.
When playing a video, you can only use the mouse:
Thanks to the following pepole for their help and beta tests:
Benjamin Gandon (Stabylo), March the 20th, 2001.