mime.types	mailcap
image/tiff                   tiff tif	xtiff -geometry +10+10 %s

[Type q inside the xtiff window to close the window]

fishes.tif (22K, TIFF image)

Document viewers

pageview  is a PostScipt viewer that is part of the OpenWindows deskset. It should always be available in a CDE and OpenWindows environment in /usr/openwin/bin. No installation or special configuration is necessary for this application.

mime.types	mailcap
application/postscript       ai eps ps	pageview -geometry 495x700 -dpi 60 %s

illusion.ps (1K, Postscript document)

acroread 3.0  (Acrobat Reader) is the latest version of a free utility for viewing, navigating, and printing Adobe Acrobat PDF files. It also offers new features like progressive display, font blitting and antialiased text.

The 3.0 version also runs as a Netscape plugin.

Download:	http://www.adobe.com/acrobat/readstep.html (about 4MB)
Home:	http://www.adobe.com/
Vendor:	Adobe

mime.types	mailcap
application/pdf                 pdf	acroread %s

cookbook.pdf (8K, Adobe Acrobat document)

VRML browsers

Both VRML 1.0 and 2.0 worlds have the same MIME type. Because there aren't any VRML browsers that can load both the 1.0 and 2.0 file formats, I have written a generic startup script dispatch-vrml that determines the version number by looking at the first "magic" line, and starts the appropriate browser. The script starts VRweb to view VRML 1.0 files, and for VRML 2.0 files, it first builds a temporary HTML file in /tmp which references the VRML file. The Java appletviewer is then called to visualize the VRML object using the Liquid Reality Java toolkit.

Begin the VRML installation by downloading the script, and install it in the search path.

Download:

dispatch-vrml (1K)

mime.types	mailcap
x-world/x-vrml                 wrl	dispatch-vrml %s %u; \             description="VRML world";

VRML 1.0

VRweb 1.3  is a browser for 3D worlds and objects modeled in the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). VRweb is the only VRML browser which is freely available in complete source code (under the GNU General Public License). It does not require commercial packages such as Inventor or Motif, and is capable of running on many platforms.

The VRweb project began as a joint project between IICM, NCSA and the University of Minnesota.

Download:	http://www.iicm.edu/vrweb-licence/ (about 800K)
Home:	http://www.iicm.edu/vrweb/
Vendor:	IICM

vrml1monolithes.wrl (9K, VRML 1.0 model)

VRML 2.0

Liquid Reality 1.0  is a VRML toolkit from Dimension X. The toolkit is a set of Java class libraries that offers VRML 2.0 functionality. With the toolkit, it is possible to create viewers, tools, and solutions that are VRML 2.0 compliant. In addition, the toolkit is extensible using Java.

Download:	http://www.dimensionx.com/products/lr/download/ (about 780K)
Home:	http://www.dimensionx.com/
Vendor:	Dimension X

Installation: This is more complicated than the VRweb installation. Download Liquid Reality 1.0 beta 11 for Solaris from Dimension X using the link above. But Liquid Reality won't run alone, it needs a Java environment. As it currently is not supported in Netscape 3.x, the choice is simple: download JDK (Java Development Kit) 1.0.2 from SunSoft to get the applet viewer:

Download:	http://www.javasoft.com/products/JDK/index.html (about 4.7MB)
Home:	http://www.javasoft.com/
Vendor:	JavaSoft

Now proceed like this:

Set the environment variable LREALITY to where you want to
install Liquid Reality, for example /usr/local/vrml/lr-1.0b11,
and install the product there

  % setenv LREALITY /usr/local/vrml/lr-1.0b11
  % mkdir -p $LREALITY
  % cd $LREALITY
  % gtar xzvf lr-sol10b11.tar.gz

Set the environment variable JDK to where you want to
install JDK 1.0.2, for example /usr/local/java/jdk-1.0.2,
and install the product there

  % setenv JDK /usr/local/java/jdk-1.0.2
  % mkdir -p $JDK
  % cd $JDK
  % gtar xzvf JDK-1_0_2-solaris2-sparc.tar.Z

Edit ~/.login and add the "setenv" definitions of LREALITY and JDK above.
The variables are only set to simplify the installation and have no
meaning to any of the products.

Create a link in $JDK/java/lib/sparc to $LREALITY/lib/sparc/libdnxice.so

  % ln -s $LREALITY/lib/sparc/libdnxice.so $JDK/java/lib/sparc

After this, exit and restart Netscape with the new environment

  % netscape &

The VRML 2.0 test link should now start up an appler viewer window
that displays the same VRML object as the VRML 1.0 test link.

vrml2monolithes.wrl (25K, VRML 2.0 model)

Liquid Reality demos: to interactively run the demos, a few more things need to be done

Add $JDK/java/bin to the search path in order to find appletviewer

  % set path=($path $JDK/java/bin)

Include the Liquid Reality classes directory in CLASSPATH

  % setenv CLASSPATH $LREALITY/classes

Compile and run the cube demo

  % cd $LREALITY/demo/ice
  % javac Cube.java
  % appletviewer cube.html

Run the viewer demo

  % cd $LREALITY/demo/lr
  % appletviewer index.html

VRML 1.0 to 2.0 translation

Sony has developed a VRML 1.0 to 2.0 converter "vrml1to2" that can be downloaded as a Solaris executable from http://vs.spiw.com/vs/vrml1to2E.html.

I have used version 1.4b of this converter to translate vrml1monolithes.wrl to vrml2monolithes.wrl with the command "vrml1to2 vrml1monolithes.wrl vrml2monolithes.wrl"

Tcl/Tk plugin 1.1  from SunLabs. The 1.1 version supports the following platforms: Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/Intel, SunOS, Windows 95, Windows NT, Macintosh, Linux, IRIX, Digital Unix and HP/UX. The scripts (or "Netscape Tcl tclets") that can be executed with this plugin are normal Tcl/Tk scripts, but they run in a slightly more restricted "Safe Tcl" environment (it's not allowed to read or write to local files by default, for example).

The 2.0 version of the plugin is also available as an alpha release.

Download:	http://www.sunlabs.com/tcl/plugin/ (about 740K)
Home:	http://www.sunlabs.com/
Vendor:	SunLabs

A number of demo tclets come with the plugin distribution, and can also be found on http://www.sunlabs.com/tcl/plugin/. The demos include: calculating mortgage payments, calculator, tetris, 15-puzzle, animated coffee, eyes that watch you, ticker tape example, line drawing program, draging text, tracing mouse events, oval drawing, bike gear ratio calculator, biorhythm clock, card game and a tcl evaluator. The FAQ for this software package is at http://www.sunlabs.com/tcl/plugin/faq.html
Contact: jyl@eng.sun.com (Jacob Levy)

Here is another tclet list extracted from comp.lang.tcl FAQ part4, August 27.

Acrobat Reader 3.0  is the latest version of the free PDF reader from Adobe. The 3.0 version makes it possible to view PDF documents inside HTML browsers (since the reader can be installed as a plug-in) and offers new features like progressive display, font blitting and antialiased text.

Download:	http://www.adobe.com/acrobat/readstep.html (about 4MB)
Home:	http://www.adobe.com/
Vendor:	Adobe

CoolTalk  is an Internet telephone tool that provides high-quality audio conferencing, a full-featured whiteboard, and text-based communications using the chat tool. With CoolTalk you can talk and work collaboratively with friends and colleagues via the Internet. Because CoolTalk works seamlessly with Navigator 3.x, calls can be sent and received directly from web pages.

Download:	http://home.netscape.com/.../download_cooltalk.html (about 5.7MB)
Home:	http://www.insoft.com/
Vendor:	InSoft, Inc.

But it certainly isn't necessary to write a complete MPEG layer 3 tutorial here, such information already exists on the Web. See this small MPEG layer 3 information page where I have collected some pointers to more information.

mpeg3play is not yet defined as a helper application on this page (as a replacement for maplay) because version 0.9 is the first, experimental release. See below instructions for how to install it as a streaming audio player for Netscape 3.x by editing the .mime.types and .mailcap files. First download the Solaris/SPARC binary and install it in your search path

Download:	mpeg3play-0_9.tgz (97K)
Home:	ftp://ftp.tnt.uni-hannover.de/pub/.../dist08.tar.gz (original source)
Author:	Johan.Hagman@mailbox.swipnet.se

Edit ~/.mime.types and add the .mp3 extension, which maps locally loaded files or files downloaded by FTP to the MIME type audio/x-mpeg

audio/x-mpeg         mp2 mp3

To define mpeg3play as the helper application for MPEG layer 2 and layer 3 files, ~/.mailcap could be changed to simply start mpeg3play instead of maplay, but then audio streaming would not work. Edit ~/.mailcap like this instead

audio/x-mpeg; mpeg3play -f -; stream-buffer-size=16000
audio/mpeg; mpeg3play -f -; stream-buffer-size=16000

This change will make Netscape open an "Audio Question" popup when it begins to download MPEG audio. The popup asks you to "Play from Network" or "Save First". Select "Play from Network" only if your network connection is fast enough to stream the data. "Save First" selects a non-streaming download that gets the complete file before mpeg3play is started to play it.

Here are three CD quality or near-CD quality audio files that need to be "Saved First". The drums sounds are recorded directly from my Roland JV-30 GM synth. The layer 3 encoding shows almost no audible degradation, but high frequencies in the layer 2 file sound "raw" and some spurious noice is introduced (listen carefully at the end of the sample). Note that only UltraSPARC CPUs can decode the layer 3 drum sound in real time (a 50MHz SuperSPARC is at least not fast enough).



bell.mp3 (7 sec, 56 kbit/s, 22.1kHz mono, 49K, ratio 6.2:1)

drums.mp2 (7 sec, 112 kbit/s, 44.1kHz stereo, 102K, ratio 12.5:1)

drums.mp3 (7 sec, 112 kbit/s, 44.1kHz stereo, 102K, ratio 12.5:1)

Use "Play from Network" for the following files. The 16 kbit/s files stream fine over a 28.8 modem, but the 24 kbit/s file requires a slightly faster connection to avoid drop-outs.



guitar.mp3 (3 min 35 sec, 16 kbit/s, 16kHz mono, 419K, ratio 16:1)

guitar-24.mp3 (24kbit/s, 22kHz version of the above. 630K, ratio 14.7:1)

dadme.mp3 (50 sec, 16 kbit/s, 22kHz mono, 97K, ratio 22:1)

Performance note: with the current version of mpeg3play, a 16 kbit/s, 22kHz layer 3 mono file is about the maximum that a 60MHz MicroSPARC II can handle when the data streams through Netscape (which adds some overhead).

Other 16 kbit/s streaming sounds for 28.8 modem connections are on Darryl
Miyaguchi's excellent page http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/mp3.html

• Star Wars theme (3 min 45 sec)
  http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/stream/swtheme.mp3
  
• Jurassic Park theme (4 min 39 sec)
  http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/stream/jptheme.mp3
  
• A Whole New World from Disney's Aladdin (4 min 2 sec)
  http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/stream/new_wrld.mp3
  
• 24kbit/s version of the above
  http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/stream/world24.mp3
  
• Title theme from "Out of Africa" (3 min 7 sec)
  http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/stream/aftheme.mp3

Known problems with mpeg3play version 0.9

• No clipping detection/correction is implemented. Clipped samples sound really ugly.
• Audio streaming through Netscape sometimes fail (probably a caching issue, try to clear the cache if this happens).
• Cannot play some 16kbps mono files, probably due to the crude implementation of bitstream synchword detection.

To decode a CD quality layer 3 bitstream in real time is a very CPU-intensive process. The UltraSPARC does it, but SuperSPARC/HyperSPARC CPUs may not be fast enough, at least with the current version of mpeg3play. Even Fraunhofer's l3dec player sometimes runs out of CPU with 44.1kHz, 128 kbit/s layer 3 stereo files. In such cases, use the mpeg3play -o option to decode to an AIFF file, which can be played with xplay or converted to a Sun audio file using sox.

Source code availability
To encourage ports to other systems, the mpeg3play source code is also available. But note that this is the portable C version, and not quite as optimized as the Solaris binary which includes three functions optimized in SPARC assembly. See the README file in the archive for more details.

To make it easier to update and improve mpeg3play, I would like to be notified of enhancements to this source, so that they can be merged into future versions of mpeg3play.

Download source:

mpeg3play-0_9-src.tar.gz (75K)

sox 11.12  (SOund eXchange) is a universal sound sample translator that can convert between a number of audio file formats and apply sound effects to audio samples.

This release understands "raw" files in various binary formats, raw textual data, Microsoft Windows .WAV files, MAUD files, Sound Blaster .VOC files, IRCAM SoundFile files, Sun .au files, mutant DEC .au files, Apple/SGI AIFF files, CD-R (music CD format), Macintosh HCOM files, Sounder files, NeXT .snd files, Sun ADPCM (compressed) .au files, Soundtool (DOS) files, and Psion (palmtop) A-law files.

The sound effects include changing the sample rate, adding echo delay lines, applying low, high, and band-pass filtering, examining sample loops and grabbing the looped parts, translating between stereo and monophonic channels, reversing a sample, adding masking noise to avoid buzzing voices, and the infamous Fender Vibro effect.

Download
Solaris/SPARC:	sox-11_12.tgz (99K)
Solaris/x86:	sox-11_12-x86.tgz (68K)
Home:	http://www.spies.com/Sox/
Author:	thinman@meer.net (Lance Norskog)

xautolock 1.10  monitors console activity, and fires up a program of you choice if nothing happens during a user configurable period of time. You can use xautolock to automatically start up a screen locker in case you tend to forget to do so manually.

It is also possible to tell xautolock to take special actions when you move the mouse pointer into one of the screen corners and leave it there.

Download
Solaris/SPARC:	xautolock-1.10.tar.gz (15K)
Solaris/x86:	xautolock-1.10-x86.tar.gz (15K)
Home:	ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/
Authors:	detroch@imec.be (Stefan De Troch) eyckmans@imec.be (Michel Eyckmans)

Here is a suggested configuration, that will fire up xlock after 8 minutes of inactivity, or after 3 seconds if the mouse pointer is moved to the top right 10-pixel area of the screen. If the pointer is left in that corner after an unlock, xlock is started again after 30 seconds.

Add the three lines below to ~/.xinitrc before the line


"if [ -x $HOME/.openwin-init ]; then"

  # Start xautolock in the background
  xautolock -time 8 -corners 0+00 -cornerdelay 3 -cornerredelay 30 \
     -locker "$OPENWINHOME/bin/xlock -allowroot -mode swarm -delay 35000" &

If the Xsun screen blanker is enabled in ~/.xinitrc (look for a line like
"xset s n", where n > 0), that line must be commented out.

xv 3.10a  displays images in the GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PBM, PGM, PPM, X11 bitmap, Utah Raster Toolkit RLE, PDS/VICAR, Sun Rasterfile, BMP, PCX, IRIS RGB, XPM, Targa, XWD, possibly PostScript, and PM formats on workstations and terminals running the X Window System

xv is shareware for personal use only, but commercial, government and institutional users must register their copies. Please read the licensing issues in the README file and send licensing questions to xvbiz@devo.dccs.upenn.edu.

xv is great for interactively displaying, cropping, converting and color correcting images, but it is not defined as a helper on this page because the size of the program makes the startup time longer than for the other, smaller image viewers.

Download
Solaris/SPARC:	xv-3_10a.tgz (531K)
Solaris/x86:	xv-3_10a-x86.tgz (474K)
Home:	ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/xv
Vendor:	xv@trilon.com

Background sounds on HTML pages

Both Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer provide a way to automatically play background sounds after a page is loaded. Unfortunately, MSIE uses the <BGSOUND> tag for background sounds while Netscape uses the <EMBED> tag. Page authors should use both if the page is intended to work with both browsers [side note: MSIE 3.01 will apparently also recogize <EMBED> tags if Active-X (or movie?) stuff is installed].

Pages with background sounds should therefore include tags like these in the body of the page (the .wav format is probably most portable and should play on most platforms):

   <EMBED SRC="bgsound.wav" TYPE="audio/x-wav" AUTOSTART=TRUE HIDDEN=TRUE>
   <BGSOUND SRC="bgsound.wav" LOOP=INFINITE>

To enable background sounds for Solaris, a HTML page can define a main frame where the text is shown and a tiny frame that just loads the audio file that should play as a background sound. Pages authored this way work with both audio plug-ins and audio helper applications.

Try this background sound test page that uses a .wav file as background sound. The page sets up its frames like this

   <FRAMESET ROWS="99%,*">
   <NOFRAMES>
     This document must be viewed using a frame-enabled browser.
   </NOFRAMES>
     <FRAME SRC="mainframe.html">
     <FRAME SRC="audio/bgsound.wav">
   </FRAMESET>