Try looking at the PCX format. It uses a form of RLE compression and has fairly
good results on non-photgraphic images. By that I mean images with large areas
of solid colors compress very well. Images with lots of "noise", such as photographic
images tend not to compress as well. In the past I used PCX images and designated
one of the color values as trasparent in my drawing routines.

The code for PCX decoding can be very small and uses very little ram. Likewise
it can also be very fast.

Good Luck!

Oh, yah,,,, try looking for information on the LZ compression algorythm. It is the
pre-cursor to LZW and is not protected, AFAIK. The W is the initial of the person
whom modified LZ into LZW and his company patented it. I think the W stand for
Welch. The L and Z are some strange names that I cannot spell, but phonetically
they sound like "Lem-ph" and "Zip-fell" or something to that effect. Sorry it was over
10 years ago that I worked with this stuff.

Dan


On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 10:19:41 -0700, Mike Hardwick wrote:

>Exactimo. The embedded system I'm developing has to *display* images, which
>means that it must decode the files. If they are GIFs, then my system has
>to use the LZW algorithm. The best deal we could negotiate with Unisys
>involved a large advance payment. We decided to make a custom file format,
>but I would rather use a standard. Whatever we use, it has to support
>transparency because the system uses images for video overlay. MIFF and PNG
>were the best candidates I found, but their code distributions are too
>massive to be useful. Any ideas?
>
>Mike Hardwick
>Decade Engineering
>
>>It would depend on whether the system was encoding or decoding or just
>>storing or sending, i.e. an embedded web site that had stored images that it
>>sent as part of an html page would not.  However, if it created the GIF's,
>>then it would.  Likewise, if it decoded a GIF, then it would.  However, if
>>it passed on the GIF to something else that incorporated a legal GIF decoder
>>then it wouldn't.
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
>ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>
>
>

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.