The Removers' Animator

Introduction
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:
	Stabylo: Benjamin.Gandon@isia.cma.fr
	Seb: Sebastien.Briais@ens-lyon.fr

Features of Animator
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:
	AVI files
	MOV video files
	FLI and FLC video files
	WAV sound files
Supported hardware are the following:
	Falcon 030 shipped with original Videl or 16 bits Nova graphic card.
	TT 030 with 16 bits Nova graphic card (other 16 bits graphic cards 
should be supported)
	Afterburner 040, Nemesis, Centurbo, etc.
	RVB/VGA switch with multisynchro monitors
Animator supports the following systems:
	TOS (4 et 3) with or without NVDI
	Magic 5 et 6 only with NVDI (automatic screen refresh is still not 
handled and VT52 complaints about modified system vectors)
	Mint (Singletos only)

How to use Animator
There is three possibilities to use Animator:
-	Use Guillaume Tello's shell which is provided with Animator.
-	Drop a file or a folder on Animator's icon
-	Install Animator as an application linked with AVI extension (and other 
if you want), and double-clic on files you want to watch.
If you want to know more about switches and possibilities of the command line, 
read the full documentation.
The user interface
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:
	The left button allows you to get to the next video still to be played 
or abort preprocessing sound. Animator still takes allways advantage of anything 
it had the time to preprocess.
	The right button aborts everything and quits Animator immediately.
	If the screen size is too small to display teh current video, moving the 
mouse lets you move accross the virtual screen (only on Falcon with Videl).

Credits
Stabylo has designed the kernel and many modules, and Seb has done the rest, 
which consist especially in sound modules and DSP code.
Thanks to the following pepole for their help and beta tests:
-	Pascal Ricard
-	Guillaume Tello


Benjamin Gandon (Stabylo), March the 20th, 2001.