[pdftex] animations inside a pdf

[Alexander Grahn]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 06:25:00PM +0200, Laurent Perrinet wrote:
>the beamer package has such a feature for including multimedia files
>
>\usepackage{multimedia}
>
The only video formats that this package supports are AVI and QuickTime.
For Flash, GIF, MPEG, ...  you should use movie15.sty.

>the problem is that 1) movies are not embedded so that you need to  
>keep multiple files
Again, movie15.sty should be used, as it is able to embed the media files.

>2) that the ability to play those movies is in my  
>experience only possible in acrobat reader (means using commercial  
>software)
I disagree. Adobe Acrobat (TeX users don't need it) is commercial,
because you have to pay for it. Adobe Reader is not, because it is free
of charge. It is closed source software, more precisely.

Moreover, Adobe Readers font and graphics rendering capabilities are
unbeatable.

>and that the playback is dependent on your system (e. g.  
>your quicktime in mac os)
That's true, but on Windows and Apple all the required plugins for playback
exist.

>It would be certainly simpler to include  
>an animated GIF (or MNG) as you would include a PNG.
How?

>I encourage you to use this package! the documentation is excellent,  
>and PGF and tikz ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgf/ ) are very  
>powerful extensions to (easily) draw small sketches in the  
>presentation...
I completely agree.

Alex