
6 Apr
2007
6 Apr
'07
4:23 p.m.
Anyone interested in GIF animation output from Chimera? Their main appeal is that they play directly in most web browsers (like banner ads). It was easy to add to the Chimera movie recorder using ffmpeg which is included in the Chimera distribution. But ffmpeg uses a fixed color palette causing severe color banding and does not offer LZW compression resulting in large file sizes. That option looks unusable. I tried another approach using a separate program called "gifsicle". That gave decent coloring and compression but it would require adding gifsicle to the Chimera distribution. I am reluctant to do that (entails future maintenance) unless there is strong interest in making GIF animations. Tom