Although they were able to reach an agreement to allow distribution of
the Cinepak decompressor, Radius insisted that it be distributed as a
binary only (despite the fact that Radius didn't even develop the code
in the first place) which effectively prevents the decompressor from
being used on most Unix workstations (the XAnim developer only has
access to a single Unix platform).
Even more onerous is Radius's requirement that the decompressor stop
working on August 1, 1996, which makes it impractical to use Cinepak
for any movies that will be distributed publicly. Although these
restrictions really only affect XAnim (and the many applications, both
commercial and freeware, that have hooks into XAnim for video and
animation playback), Radius has stated that they have no plans to
support Unix/X11 workstations directly and so it is unlikely that
there will be any other video/animation players that support Cinepak.
Therefore, if there is any possibility that movies that you are
currently developing will have to run on Unix workstations at some
point in the future, I strongly recommend that you not use the Cinepak
codec to compress them. Radius is the only vendor to impose these
restrictions, and so you should be OK if you use any other popular
codec.
If you have any questions about or problems with this issue, feel free
to contact me (raney@metacard.com) or Radius (cinepak@radius.com,
though this address is apparently a black hole since no one there has
responded to my requests for information).
Regards,
Scott Raney
-- *********************************************************************** * Scott Raney 303-447-3936 Remember: the better you look, * * raney@metacard.com the more you'll see -- Lidia * ***********************************************************************