Hello, I'm working on a little raytracer which I'd like to use to produce some short animations (render the scene, save it out as a frame of video, move some stuff, render the scene again, save it out etc etc). I'm trying to work out what file format would be the simplest thing to save the video out as. - I don't need to save out any audio - I would like the format to be something as universal and cross-platform as possible, the kind of thing that you can display on Windows, Linux and Mac boxes - I don't mind too much about the resulting file size - by which I mean I'd rather have simple code and a big resulting video file than complex code (or reliance on external libraries) and a smaller video file. - I could probably cope with having some kind of colour palette rather than full 24-bit RGB values, if that was necessary. - I'm writing in C/C++, if it makes any difference Any suggestions? I figured maybe GIF or some kind of AVI codec perhaps, but I don't know how cross-platform they are, or how easy it is to create those kind of files. Ideally I'd just like something where I can just write a file header saying "This is a video file of type FOO. It's size is X * Y pixels, and it's Z frames long", followed by just a series of images. Are there still such naive formats in reasonably common usage anywhere?

A simple solution would be to shift the problem onto another piece of software - save out the frames as PNG/JPEG/Bitmaps, and then use some free video software like virtualdub to encode those frames into MPEG2/MPEG4/Quicktime/DivX

Hi, thanks for the replies.

I'm aware that the simplest option from a coding standpoint would be to save out a series of images and let another program do the conversion, and that trying to write my own video exporter as part of the program is kinda reinventing the wheel, but for various strange and complex reasons, I'd like my program to be a standalone thing with no reliance on other programs or libraries.

From hunting around a bit, it looks like GIF might be a workable solution, although that's based only on the fact that I managed to find a reasonably clear specification for it, and it's a file format I've heard of. If there's anything which is as simple (or simpler!) to write an exporter for and doesn't require indexed colour, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Save frames in PNG or JPEG, and then use the free, open, available-as-a-debian-package FFMPEG library or command-line application to convert to whatever video format you want.