Re: animations with gdk-pixbuf

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Wolfgang Sourdeau <wolfgang@ultim.net> writes:

> I am going to add multi-page support for the tiff loader.
> I am wondering however if we shouldn't add support for on-demand loading
> of frames for the same reasons I would like to have bitmap support.
> 
> I think the only application of multi-page tiff are fax files. (although there
> may be others, I am not sure). If a typical fax page has 1700x2100 pixels and
> you receive a fax of 25 pages, your computer has to at least
> 1700x2100x25=89250000 bytes of free memory in the only current 8bit/pixel model.
> Even if modern computers often have 128Mb of RAM, this is unacceptable for
> a bitmap application to be so hungry...

Have you seen the progressive loading API for gdk-pixbuf?
<http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gdk-pixbuf/gdkpixbufloader.html>

If you added support for multi-page tiffs to the tiff-loader, you could
potentially feed data to the loader, use the frame when the page comes
in, and unref it when done.  This way you only have one page in memory
at one time.  It would, of course, be better to have gdk-pixbuf support
bitmaps, but the issues involved with that have already been hashed out
on this list.

Thanks,
-Jonathan