The FLI/FLC Animation Format

The FLI/FLC animation format, originally developed by Autodesk, Inc is sometimes more desirable than the MPEG animation format, particularly for computer-generated animations.

Playing FLI/FLC movies:

Get one of the following players: If you are running a graphical Web browser and you want to view these movies "on the fly", you probably will need to tell your browser to recognize .fli and .flc extensions as MIME type video/fli, and you will also need to tell the browser to use the appropriate FLI/FLC player when it encounters type MIME type video/fli.

For example, if you are using an X windows browser, you need to first add the following line to the file /usr/local/lib/mime.types or $HOME/.mimetypes: 

video/flc                      flc fli
If you are serving FLI/FLC files, you should add the above line to the mime.types file in your httpd's conf directory so that the server can identify FLI/FLC movies to browsers. Then add the following line to /usr/local/lib/mailcap or $HOME/.mailcap: 
# This maps fli video to the viewer 'xanim'.
video/x-fli; xanim %s

Making FLI/FLC movies:

FLI/FLC makers generally take a bunch of image files that each contain a single movie frame and combine them into a FLI/FLC movie. Since FLI/FLC movies are 8-bit, there are usually some options for picking the optimal colormap from images that have more than 8-bits of color information or have separate 8-bit palettes for each image.

The fli animations presented here are all created with PPM2FLI . This encodes FLC movies taking PPM, PGM, PBM or FBM files as input, and also includes a FLC decoder to turn FLC movies into individual images. If your movie frames are in some other image format, like .gif or .pcx, you will also need the NetPBM image conversion & manipulation programs .

If you are serving your FLC files up on the web, you might consider installing Klaus Ehrenfried's Java applet which can play Fli/Flc animations within HTML pages without the need of plugins.

Assorted FLI/FLC utilities

The following programs convert FLI/FLC to other movie forms directly (GraphicConverter), or allow one to split the FLI/FLC into individual frames and then generate another movie format (DISPLAY & PPM2FLI).