Conference hydra::amiga_v1

> 1. What is the "best"  way to view gif images on the Amiga?

Well, unless you have some special hardware (frame buffer) that supports 
8 bitplanes, your best best is to convert the GIFs to IFFs.  I believe 
that there are several frame buffers that (with proper software) can 
view GIFs directly.

> 2. what is the "best" GIF -> IFF -> Amiga screen process?

The best commercial package is "The Art Department - Professional" (TAD-Pro).
The picture quality is outstanding, nice UI, ability to drive all kinds of
nifty frame buffers, I/O devices such as scanners, etc.  I don't own it,
but I'm saving up to get it.  

A very good PD utility is GIF2IFF by Steve Drew.  I use this quite often,
and have had very good results with it.  One GREAT feature is that it
can run under VMS or ULTRIX.  On the DECstation it rarely takes more than
6-9 seconds to convert most 8bit pictures.  On my 020 Amiga, its more like
.5-1+min.

GIF2IFF supports HAM, "standard", SHAM, and DynaRES IFF formats.  The
picture quality isn't as good as TAD-Pro (maybe?), but it's still very 
good. 

There is also a GIFMachine on one of the Fish disks, but I haven't 
tried it out yet.  I believe it has an Intuition interface, while 
GIF2IFF is strictly CLI based.

Whatever you choose... you'll appreciate an accelerator. 

Steve  

  The best commercial package is "The Art Department - Professional" (TAD-Pro).
  The picture quality is outstanding, nice UI, ability to drive all kinds of
  nifty frame buffers, I/O devices such as scanners, etc.  I don't own it,
  but I'm saving up to get it.  

Just curious - how does "The Art Department" stack up on doing just the
GIF->IFF conversions? Has anyone compared TAD and ADPro? (There are features
comparisons in the notesfile already).

	<mike

    I started with "The Art department", and later moved on to ADPro. I 
    don't remember if The Art department did gifs without adding a load,
    save module. ADpro II is soon to be released, and that will be much
    better than AD. I say spend the extra dollars for ADPro, or ty AD, and
    update later. ADPro is very very good. I have the loaders for tiff,
    rendition, and a few of the other modules. I have to call ASDG because
    some loaders broke going to 1.03. @.0 will come with a patch that
    will update all loaders etc to 2.0 specs, So I may just get the update
    and save a call. There in no comparing the functionally between AD, and
    ADPro. ADPro offers much more in terms of loaders, and operators.
    							bill 

    For viewing I use AdPro (described in previous replies) to convert to
    IFF and then the Video Toaster at System Eyes to make the image
    visible.  Even though the Video Toaster drives a composite monitor the
    results look really good.
        John Sauter

    For a PD solution, give these a try (though they don't fit the base
    noter's requirement of "best", I'm afraid).

    To view gifs directly on the Amiga, try virtgif. It's slow, but allows
    you to scroll around the picture. Doesn't do the best of jobs, but if
    you just want to take a quick look at a gif without having to convert it,
    it'll do the trick.

    I've tried gif2iff (the Amiga version) and found it to produce garbage
    more often than it produces something useful. 

    GIFMachine (a 1.3 AmigaDOS version which I recently uploaded to eot),
    does a fairly good job of converting a gif to a sham, which can then be
    viewed with Mostra. If you're looking for speed, GIFMachine isn't the
    place to look. It's very slow.

    All these should be on eot somewhere.

    -Dom

    I use "gif2iff -f -p -d file.gif file.iff" for most of my gif pictures.
    since hamsharp couldn't handle some of the larger gif pictures.
    Then I view the results with Mostra or SuperView.
    
    To view the gifs directly, I use hamgif (slow, but in color) or
    TurboGIF (somewhat faster, but not color).
    
    None of the above meet the "Best" requirement when you use GIFs
    that require a large color pallete.
    
    dennis
                                                     

TAD doesn't have "saver" modules; it can only create IFF images (though
24-bit deep). It doesn't come with a GIF saver; that's extra. I went to
ADPro on the ugprade because it cost me about $10 more than the savers
I wanted to buy for TAD, came with them, and had a Rexx port.

However, if you want to convert GIFs to IFF, TAD + a GIF loader is liable
to be a lot cheaper than ADPro. If you need the extra functionality that
ADPro provides, it's clearly worth it. If you don't, then the question
of interest is how much (if any) better ADPro is than TAD at converting
GIFs to IFF.

That's the question I'm trying to get answered. I don't think I have TAD
around anymore, or I'd try it...

	<mike

    Could someone upload/put pointer to giff2if for ULTRIX risc?
    
    Thanks,
    
    
    Greg

	I always use gif2iff on VMS to convert to IFF, and then I download
        IFF files. I've never had a problem since I started using the 
        latest version. The AMIGA version works ok provided you do a 
        STACK 10000 first, otherwise your picture may be incomplete.

        There are loads if IFF viewer programs in the public domain. 
        Some of these provide extra features like scrolling around large 
        images, some can make a slide show out of all IFF files on a disk.
	The fancier utilities do tend to eat a bit more RAM space. 

        I use 'viewilbm' just to preview an image because its easy on memory.
	I use 'loadimage' to look at large images and 'superview' for doing
	slide shows. Mind you there are no doubt loads of others that I've 
        never tried.

	re .8
If I understand correctly, you want a program to run on RISC ULTRIX that
converts gif to ilbm. If that is, indeed, what you want, then you could use
pbmplus. It converts many file formats to an intermediate format, ppm, then
converts ppm to many formats. So you would convert gif->ppm, then ppm->ilbm.

	You can get the archive from:

nestvx::imaging/pbmplus30oct91.tar.Z

	The idea behind the intermediate format is that if you want to support
N file formats, it takes 2N conversion programs instead of N**2 programs.