> Thanks Vincent for the information. One reason I am choosing not to > use povray is the license, which I believe is not compatible with > inclusion in Sage.
Ah. I didn't know about the license, I had a look and indeed it is not quite free enough. BTW I am not pushing povray as such, simply saying that a way to export a plot into some scene description language is doable with minimal, or at least reasonable, work. > Btw, the tachyon raytracer does seem to have good multicore support dy > default. Unfortunately it cannot animate. I wish we had someone who > could add that ability - to be clear, I think we need good movie > format in terms of compression and multiplatform support. Animating > GIFs is well supported but too clunky for longer animations. In terms of compression, nothing will beat a script for the raytracer du jour, but that's not quite an animation format. In terms of movies, there are a few cross-platform possibilities but if you want to be really careful you will have to look into patents this time ... A few believable possibilities : - Integrate mencoder/mplayer, or at least one agreed-upon codec. Use a raytracer to generate frames, via a script, encode that into video, play the video. Except that embedding video into a web page (such as the notebook) in a cross-platform way is a pain where you guess - although mp4/h264 works in many places. If you only want movies to play on machines where Sage is installed, then mplayer (or VLC) really should be cross-platform - but it breaks the whole notebook way. - Integrate something like ffmpeg, encode to flash .flv, and rely on the presence of flash player. That's even less cross-platform, but on the other hand flash is installed wherever it can be. - Look for / write some kind of animation description format and a real-time player using OpenGL, that is cross-platform. Or maybe a java applet. That's the only way to get some interactivity, but if it doesn't exist yet it quite a bit of work. /v -- Vincent Beffara UMPA - ENS Lyon 46 Allée d'Italie 69364 LYON cedex 07 Tel: 04 72 72 85 25 Fax: 04 72 72 84 80 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
