From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21554 invoked by alias); 22 Aug 2011 18:36:44 -0000 Received: (qmail 21347 invoked by uid 22791); 22 Aug 2011 18:36:43 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,RP_MATCHES_RCVD X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from etr-usa.com (HELO etr-usa.com) (130.94.180.135) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:36:19 +0000 Received: (qmail 34112 invoked by uid 13447); 22 Aug 2011 18:36:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO [172.20.0.42]) ([71.210.200.129]) (envelope-sender ) by 130.94.180.135 (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP for ; 22 Aug 2011 18:36:18 -0000 Message-ID: <4E52A194.10308@etr-usa.com> Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:36:00 -0000 From: Warren Young User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20110812 Thunderbird/6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: cygwin-apps@cygwin.com Subject: Re: setup.exe opening page graphic References: <20110812065957.GH16226@calimero.vinschen.de> <4E495CD1.3020908@etr-usa.com> <4E498B18.3030405@etr-usa.com> <20110816083536.GH25129@calimero.vinschen.de> <4E4AC4C2.5010307@etr-usa.com> <20110817154643.GE27614@calimero.vinschen.de> <4E4D7F19.9000707@etr-usa.com> <20110819153959.GA13266@calimero.vinschen.de> <4E4EE245.1080704@etr-usa.com> <20110820111627.GK13266@calimero.vinschen.de> In-Reply-To: <20110820111627.GK13266@calimero.vinschen.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact cygwin-apps-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk Sender: cygwin-apps-owner@cygwin.com List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Mail-Followup-To: cygwin-apps@cygwin.com X-SW-Source: 2011-08/txt/msg00219.txt.bz2 On 8/20/2011 5:16 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote: > Are GIFs always so low on colors? Yes. GIF is limited to a 256-color palette. It's a hard technical limit of the format, and was one of the driving forces behind the PNG development effort. Animation makes it worse because all the frames share a single palette. This is why the first frame has green casts in the shadows even though, in the renders, frame 0 has no green: there's a fair bit of green in the overall animation, so the color quantization algorithm included some in the global palette, and that then happened to be the closest color when quantizing this particular frame's shadows. I used ffmpeg to create that GIF animation, but that really isn't its forté. A lot of programmer brain power got thrown at the problem of improving GIF animation back in the bad old Web 1.0 days, before PNG and Flash took over the world. Photoshop does a lot better: http://etr-usa.com/cygwin/logo/from-box/animation2.gif The color casts are gone, the dithering is gone, and the frame rate is fixed. Also, I went ahead and applied the background masks, which as predicted made the animation a lot smaller. animation2.gif is about 1/6 the size of animation.gif, but that's still 41% bigger than the MPEG-2 version and twice as big as the WMV7. I think Photoshop's given us as much space savings and made as good a use of the limited box of crayons as we can reasonably hope for. Given that, I'd still prefer that someone decide to take on the DirectShow challenge. I don't think it would be much harder than getting a GIF animation to show in setup.exe using only the Windows API; I think you'd have to embed IE, which is also a COMmy mess. > are they always running in a (much too fast) loop? No, that's just a bug in the program I used to create it. The new version linked above fixes this. > Btw., I asked our legal dept about licensing implications due to using > derived art from the DAZ models. Thank you!