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Re : XCF file format

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XCF file format Tino Schwarze 03 Feb 18:24
Re : XCF file format Jean-Yves Lamoureux 03 Feb 19:06
  Re : XCF file format Simon Budig 03 Feb 19:12
   Re : XCF file format Marc) (A.) (Lehmann 03 Feb 23:54
  Re : XCF file format Sven Neumann 03 Feb 19:25
Tino Schwarze
2003-02-03 18:24:19 UTC (about 21 years ago)

XCF file format

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 06:17:48PM +0100, Jean-Yves Lamoureux wrote:

I begun an XCF loader (for a later use in mplayer), but I lack clear docs, as source code is a bit rusty to read like that :)

Why would a movie player like mplayer want to use a file format which is considered to be used-by-The-GIMP-only?

easily converting a xcf "animation" file to anything readable by mplayer (using mencoder).

There is no such thing as an xcf animation file... If you're talking about that animation support involving multiple files, you can simply batch convert them to PNG using // and then probably encode them to anything you want.

And apart from that, writing a sort of libxcf , for my personnal and anyone_who_want use.

The problem is: xcf depends on the GIMP internals heavily. You'd need to reinvent or fork lots of GIMP code to get really useful XCF support. I would not want to do that. BTW: There was some effort to add XCF support to ImageMagick a while ago (probably Sven meant that thread).

You might be better off writing a Perl-Fu to do the job.

Bye, Tino.

Jean-Yves Lamoureux
2003-02-03 19:06:56 UTC (about 21 years ago)

Re : XCF file format

Marco Wessel wrote:

I think he might mean multi-layered XCF files. Like how we represent multi-frame GIFs.

exactly.
How can the xcf file format so close to gimp's code ? I mean, there are layers, layers are a bunch of parameters, and a data field, where pixels are stored, no ?
If you're talking about all blending, tracks, etc which are gimp relative, it's not that a big deal, as a quite complete 2d engine include these functions, some sort of basic wrappers will do the job

Simon Budig
2003-02-03 19:12:05 UTC (about 21 years ago)

Re : XCF file format

Jean-Yves Lamoureux (jylam@lnxscene.org) wrote:

Marco Wessel wrote:

I think he might mean multi-layered XCF files. Like how we represent multi-frame GIFs.

exactly.
How can the xcf file format so close to gimp's code ? I mean, there are layers, layers are a bunch of parameters, and a data field, where pixels are stored, no ?
If you're talking about all blending, tracks, etc which are gimp relative, it's not that a big deal, as a quite complete 2d engine include these functions, some sort of basic wrappers will do the job

Basically "close to gimp's code" means: "Is subject to change without notice". There is fancy stuff in it like parasites, text layers in the near future and also Path stuff. Of course this could be ignored safely but we could also decide to add new layer modes etc. pp, maybe we at some time get layer groups which might have a significant impact on the rendering pipeline.

I think you face a huge task with little value - xcf will never become a widely accepted animation standard. Having this in mplayer would of course have a cool showoff value but thats basically it and I don't think it is worth the effort.

Bye, Simon

Sven Neumann
2003-02-03 19:25:12 UTC (about 21 years ago)

Re : XCF file format

Hi,

Jean-Yves Lamoureux writes:

How can the xcf file format so close to gimp's code ? I mean, there are layers, layers are a bunch of parameters, and a data field, where pixels are stored, no ?

the pixel data is layed out to match GIMP's internal representation. The idea behind this concept was to be able to mmap the tiles directly from the file although this part has never been implemented. And there is a whole lot more to XCF than layers ...

I'd suggest you use a more standardized animation format such as MNG.

XCF is not meant to be used by anything but The GIMP. It's not documented and we usually discourage people from using it. One of the reasons is that it makes it easier for us to change the format without taking the risk of breaking lots of third-party applications.

For GIMP-2.0 we might try to design a file format that is better suited as an inter-application exchange format. We've already spent some thought on this and it might even happen one day.

Salut, Sven

Marc) (A.) (Lehmann
2003-02-03 23:54:18 UTC (about 21 years ago)

Re : XCF file format

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 07:12:05PM +0100, Simon Budig wrote:

widely accepted animation standard. Having this in mplayer would of course have a cool showoff value but thats basically it and I don't think it is worth the effort.

To the contrary - an unmaintained input format named xcf that doesn't work with current versions of that file format will have the opposite effect.