VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 16 2009 - 11:27:08 CDT

Tom,
  That changelog appears to be something done by Suse, not by
the NetPBM authors. You'll note that ppmtompeg is indeed included
in the standard NetPBM source distribution:
  http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/netpbm/netpbm-10.35
  http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppmtompeg.html
  
I'd remove the broken RPM version provided by Suse and compile it from
source for yourself. I assume the Suse people removed ppmtompeg out of
fear of patents or some other legal-related issue. Most distros have
removed all video/audio codecs by default for these reasons, requiring
users to jump through hoops to fix their deficient default install.
In the present case, it's probably just best to compile yourself and
throw away whatever modified version of NetPBM the Suse people provide
by default. It shouldn't be difficult to compile from source, besides,
compiling from source builds character :-)

Cheers,
  John Stone
  johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:14:15AM -0500, Thomas C. Bishop wrote:
> Got it.
>
> It seems that default NETPBM does not have ppmtompeg so the VMD developers
> should be aware that there are "extra" hurdles for folks (like me) that want
> things to work "out of the box"
>
> This old posting suggests I'm not the only one
> http://forums.opensuse.org/archives/sf-archives/archives-software/341764-netpbm-ppmtompeg.html
>
> it appears from NETPBM changelog located at
> http://www.rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/opensuse/factory/x86_64/netpbm-10.35.64-1.2.x86_64.html
>
> * Wed Apr 11 2007 nadvornik_at_suse.cz
> - removed ppmtompeg sources [#261140]
>
> who know who but not why?
> Do other distro's have this problem?
>
> Tom
>
> On Thursday 16 July 2009, John Stone wrote:
> > Tom,
> > You will need to install a working version of the NetPBM toolkit in order
> > to allow the vmdmovie plugin to take care of the entire movie generation
> > process, as that's the package that the "ppmtompeg" package is part of.
> > You can also use the movie maker to generate the raw frames for your movie,
> > and then compress them with the movie encoder of your choice, if you'd
> > rather not use ppmtompeg, or if you have a more convenient tool (e.g. the
> > Apple quicktime tools are quite popular).
> >
> > Cheers,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:55:57AM -0500, Thomas C. Bishop wrote:
> > > If I blindly click away to "make movie " in VMD (1.8.6 and 1.8.7 ) it
> > > does not work.
> > >
> > > The problem appears to be that SUSE does not get ppmtompeg w/ the
> > > prepacked netpbm (think I got all of these details correct)
> > >
> > > This is what Imagemagik calls to convert to mpeg (again doing this from
> > > memory)
> > >
> > > Other's have this problem?
> > > Suggestions? Ideas? Workarounds?
> > >
> > > Thanks
> > > Toim
>
>
>
> --
> **********************
> Thomas C. Bishop *
> Office: 504-862-3370 *
> Fax: 504-862-8392 *
> ********************** 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
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University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
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