OpenImageIO - my adventure with OpenSource

OpenImageIO - Windows port

2009-07-15T00:48:00.000-07:00

Windows port of OIIO is done! As for now it works under Visual Studio (tested on 2005 and 2008 version) and nmake. Instruction how to build OIIO on Windows is here.

Of course, Windows port isn't perfect yet. I would say that this is early beta. It works as 32-bit library (and apps). 64-bit version will be ready after GSoC. Also, IV viewer doesn't work as it should be - for now it's working as subsystem:console application, not subsystem:windows. This will be fixed later - for now I have more important tasks.

If someone of the reader of this blog want to test the installer, it is here. You can install client version (applications + DLL) or developer version (applications + DLL + header files + .lib file). Of course, there is also documentation included. So, test please and if something doesn't work as it should - give me some feedback.

You can also join to the developer team. Reade here how to do that. And if You want develop Windows version, look at (mentioned earlier) this page.

In the end I just write that whole building system for OIIO is based on three tools. CMake that creates project files (Visual Studio solutions, Unix Makefiles and lot more), CTest that autmates tests and CPack that creates the installer. All this tools are absolutely great! I just purchased a book - Masterin Cmake - so, be sure that till end of the summer I start tutorial on how to use these tools!

Now, it's time to the second task. Plugins!

1e-01, 1e-001

2009-07-11T01:31:00.000-07:00

For last few days I was wondering why program, that prints float values in scientific format, builded with g++ prints 1e-01 and builded with Visual Studio prints 1e-001. It was really irritating and in my case it broke all test on Windows.

But there is the way to standarize this. Default behaviour for Visual Studio programs can by changed by calling _set_output_format with _TWO_DIGIT_EXPONENT argument. After that programs builded with VS prints 1e-01. And everyone is happy!

Hope I helped:)

Another way to build OIIO on Windows

2009-06-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

I published another instruction on how to build OIIO on Windows. They are here. Test please;)

How to start developing OIIO on Windows

2009-06-14T05:42:00.000-07:00

If You want to start developing OIIO on Windows You'll need some extra tools:

Visual Studio 2005 - I work on this. On others compillers OIIO probably won't build yet
Cmake
Some externals libraries: Boost 1.38, IlmBase 1.0.1, OpenEXR 1.6.1, Zlib 1.2.3, libpng 1.2.3, Thread Building Blocks.

You can download precompiled BOOST library from here. Other libraries You can compile by Yourself. Or if You don't want to You can download precompiled in VS 2005 libraries from here.

Before we start working on OIIO we have to do some preparation. Firstly: You have to checkout my branch - I recommend for this program called TortoiseSVN. URL for my branch: http://svn.openimageio.org/oiio/branches/robertm.

Next, unpack downloaded external libraries to folder that is sibling to folder that contains downloaded code from my branch. Also, install BOOST.

After that we have to set some flags (You can add this flags to system variables or You can make small script that will do that with 'set' command):

BOOST_ROOTshould point to main directory where BOOST is installed

ILMBASE_INCLUDE_AREA should point to directory where IlmBase header files are stored(\dist\windows\ilmbase-1.0.1\include\OpenEXR)

ILMBASE_LIBRARIES should point to IlmBase .lib files (those in dist\windows\ilmbase-1.0.1\lib\)

OPENEXR_INCLUDE_AREA should point to directory where OpenEXR inlcude files are stored (dist\windows\openexr-1.6.1\include\OpenEXR)

OPENEXR_LIBRARY should point to file IlmImf.lib (dist\windows\openexr-1.6.1\lib\IlmImf.lib)

ZLIB_INCLUDE_DIR should point to Zlib include direcotry (dist\windows\zlib-1.2.3\include)

ZLIB_LIBRARY should point to file zdll.lib (dist\windows\zlib-1.2.3\lib\zdll.lib)

PNG_PNG_INCLUDE_DIR should point to PNG include directory (dist\windows\libpng-1.2.3\include)

PNG_LIBRARY should point to libpng13.lib (dist\windows\libpng-1.2.3\lib\libpng13.lib)

Additionali You should add directory with precompiled DLLs (external/DLLs) to PATH variable. This directoy contains precompiled DLL libraries that are required by OIIO library and applications.

Finally, You have to run build.bat file that call cmake that build Visual Studio 2005 solution.

As for today library and all applications are working (except IV). Plugins for bmp, hdr, openexr nad png also works. The rest should be ready till next week.

Feel free to give me some feedback;)

GSoC 2009 - Week 2

2009-06-08T03:15:00.000-07:00

Second week of Google Summer of Code has passed so it is time for second summary of work I've done.

We are going forward with my porting OIIO for Windows project. In the last week I've made some changes that make some applications to work. As for now: iconvert, idiff and igrep applications works. Additionally plugins for bmp and hdr formats also works.

There are few issues with iinfo and maketx applications and openexr plugin - both cannot be linked as ofu "nresolved external symbol" error (LNK2019) to functions in Strutil.h. The same error with OpenEXR plugin.

I hope I remove this error till next weekend. Also, I want to compile and link all others plugins. And if I will have some free (spare?) time I try to write a little tutorial on how to set up OIIO project in Windows - mayby there are peoples on the net that want to develop Windows version of OpenImageIO:)

Have a nice day!:)

GSoC 2009 - Week 1 "Raport"!

2009-06-01T02:18:00.000-07:00

Officialy the first week of codind end up two days ago so this is time to do a little summery.

But first I write about things that changed in OIIO since the last post. There are two new developers in the project (of course - without GSoCers): Leszek Godlewski - write a plugin for ICO format - and Chris Foster - switched OIIO building system form make to cmake (together with Larry and others).

We have also new build system that is based on cmake. Personally I think that this is a great change - now building project in Visual Studio is as easy as making makefiles:) This saved me a lot of work on my first task.

So, where am I with my task. A week ago I ended setting up libraries (boost, OpenEXR, ...) and write little bat file to simplify building VS project and then I started to working on OpenImageIO library. I tried to compile it and link but there were some problems. The most funny was the conflict beetween std::min and std::numeric_limits::min() caused by iincluding windows.h in one of the boost header. I try to remove this error by adding parentheses around the statements:) In the end - adding #define NOMINMAX before the boost headers helped.

In this week I want to force iinfo to work. For now - I have some problems with linking it to boost libraries. When I try to run iinfo - debugger is informing me that there is no Manifest file to the boost DLL... strange, I use boos a lot and never needed this Manifest files!

So, for now, this is all.

PS: when the program started Google fund for us membership in ACM library! Great gift!

Other GSoC project for OIIO

2009-04-29T04:40:00.000-07:00

I was so happy when I read that I was accepted to GSoC that I forgott about others students that will work for OpenImageIO. Here small info about projects that they will be implementing:

Dinco Galetic will add Python bindings (through Boost::Python)so Python programs could access all OIIO's functionalities.
Irena Damsky will add image editing functionality (crop, rotate, flip, scale and much more!) to iBuffer API
Ismael Cortés will force iv to work wit OpenGL 1.x. You can read more on this on his blog.

Congratulations for all of them!

OpenJPEG and Jasper

2009-04-29T02:20:00.000-07:00

So, currently I'm getting ready to start coding my GSoC project. I started to search libraries that I can use to write formats plugin - I think there is no point to discover the wheel again and that tested solution are safer and faster.

I started with JPEG-2000 format and found two libraries that implements this format and have compatible licenses.

The first one is OpenJPEG - it is distributen on BSD license and it look like it have implemented basic encoder and decoder. It's hard to write anything else about it - documentation is't to descriptive. It also hard to find informations about applications that use this library.

The second library is JasPer (MIT license). It have good documentation and big list of applications that use it (including XnView, ImageMagic nad Kopete). Additionali it has two cons: firstly: implements codecs of other formats like BMP, PGX and PNM so we can use this library to write plugins for this formats; secondly: it looks like the structure of the code allow us to fetch out only the files that we need for JPEG-2000 format so won't have to include the whole library (am I wrong?). It's better to include three or four (or even five;)) files rather then whole library and make another dependence.

I'm interesting in Your opinion - have You used any of this libraries? Are they good?

Second part of this entry will be about CMake - this application generates project files for variosu IDE. If You are using gcc - it will generate Makefile files, if You're using Code::Blocks it will generate Code::Blocks project file and if You're using Visual Studio it will generate Visual Studio Solution file. And it's all based on CMakeList.txt files. For me - it's really great tool - I can easily move project from one IDE to another and I don't have to worry where I should add this linker or preprocesor option. I simply put it into CMakeList.txt file. This is definitely the solution for peoples who like easy stuff. Read about this!

This entry is translation of the entry from my blog in polish (orginal entry). Forgive me my grammar, style or anything else that is connected with writing in english. And please, write "bug fixes" of my mistakes in the comments:) I'll be glad for that!

Yet another accepted GSoC Applications

2009-04-26T14:01:00.001-07:00

In the last blog entry I show how my applications looks like. But I was not the only one. A lot of other GSoC students also share their proposals with the hope that somebody will use them in the future.

Belowe are links to blogs, where students published their proposal. If You find another one (that is not listed belowe), pleas put a comment with link to it and I will add it to my "application collection". Have a nice reading!

AbiWord:

AbiWord with GetText by Keith Bowes

The Apache Software Fundation:

Implement the SOAP/JMS specification for CXF by Cong Liu

Creative Commons:

Creative Commons Add-in for OpenOffice.org Updates by Nimalaprakasan Skandhakumar

GenMAPP:

Biopax plugin implementation for PathVisio by Adem Bilican

Globus Alliance:

Performance characterization of GridFTP on 10+ Gigabit networks using hosts with 10 Gigabit network interface cards by Raj Kettimuthu

KDE:

Basic tables support for KWord by Elvis Stansvik
OSM Annotation for Marble Desktop Globe with an Optimised interface for smaller screens by Andrew Manson
Saving and loading enhancement through metadata by Alessandro Sivieri

Maemo Community:

Semantic-Based Context-aware Personalized News reader System for Maemo by Feng Gao

Moodle

What You Paint Is What You Get by Mihai Sucan

NUIGroup:

Recognition, Tracking and Association of Hands, Fingers, and Blobs: A Community Core Upgrade by Thiago Araujo

The Python Software Fundation:

3to2 tool for backporting Py3 code by Joe Amenta

Sahana:

P2P Synchronization of Shana Servers by Hasanat Kazmi

WinLibre:

WinLibre Package Creator by Chris Oliver

I'm in!

2009-04-21T01:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday list with accepted to GSoC students was published. I am pleased to announce that I will be one of this lucky guys who will be working as a programmer within GSoC!

I haven't write anything about what I will be doing. This is a time to do it. But if You don't know for what organization I applied - read this.

So, I have two tasks: in the first half of summer I'll port the library to the Windows family systems. It's no secret that I'm one of few people that like this system. I frequently use it, think that VS is one of the best IDE in the world - I will with pleasure correct the code so it could work on this system. This task was made for me:)!

In the second half of the summer I add support for three formats. I've choosen JPEG-2000 - as it is ISO standard, FITS - not very popular but great format. Made by scientists and for scientists! The last one is DNG - RAW file format designed by Adobe Systems, in the near future will be ISO standard (or mayby is it now?). In the near future is should be supportet by all camera producers.

And the best part of this note. Most of my friend are asking me to publish my proposal. So here it is!

This entry is translation of the entry from my blog in polish (orginal entry). Also, forgive me my grammar, style or anything else that is connected with writing in this language. And please, write "bug fixes" of my mistakes in the comments:) I'll be glad for that!

What I've done to lift up my chances in this year GSoC

2009-04-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

The list of accepted students will be announced tommorow so it looks like it is good time to write about what I've done to lift my chances up.

Of course, I was patching and adding features to the library :)

I started modestly - just after I decided that OIIO is the project I want to develop in this year GSoC I sent my first bug-fix: iinfo application wasn't print information about usage when was called without arguments. I fastly add one word to the source code, make a diff, sent it to the dev-list and one of my dream have been true - I started developing OpenSource project!

Winged by this experience I change the call from deprecated method to the new one by changing two lines of code in four files.

I know that this two fixes was minor changes but they allowed me to accustome with the project and to realize, that on the other side also works peoples and that they make mistakes.

The next step of my "Lift up Your GSoC chances" plan include writing BMP plugin - it looks easy for the start on my more advance adventure with OIIO. It's all went good when I write the part of the plugin that was responsible for reading "meta-datas". But when I started to write code responsible for reading pixel-data it turns out that I have problem with opening graphic files. The reason: iv works only with OpenGL 2.x clients.

So me and my friend started to dissolve this problem. We wanted to force iv to work with OpenGL 1.x. And it was hard - not because it was difficult task but nodoby of us have experience with OGL. We started looking informations about the problem in the internet and discovered that standard texures in OpenGL 1.x (in our case GL_TEXTURE_2D) must be power-of-two sized. In the next few day we wrote a little patch that fix this bug and from this moment iv works with OGL 1.x (but only wit the core functionality).

When rendering of the images worked I can end writing BMP plugin. Currently reading is "almost ready" - it works with 4-, 8-, 24- and 32-bits (but only with uncompressed images that width % 4 == 0). I probably fix this it after the weekend.

So, You see I was very hard-working. I hope that will be enough. But when I look at others GSoC applicants I have some doubts - they also done great job. I belive that mentors have hard choice...

See You tommorow at 21:00 UTC:)

This entry is translation of the entry from my blog in polish language (orginal entry). Also, forgive me my grammar, style or anything else that is connected with writing in this language. And please, write "bug fixes" of my mistakes in the comments:) I'll be glad for that!

OpenImageIO - open library for reading and writing graphic files

2009-04-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

In the previous blog entry I mentioned that within GSoC I would like to start developing OpenImageIO. I think it's good time to write something about that project.

So, OpenImageIO is - as You probably figured out from title - free library to reading and writing 2D images with easy to use API. Of course - the whole API is format independent and support for new formats is realised by the plugins.

The library is shipped with some tools that demostrate is use:

iv - image viewer (based on QT4.5) that can open and save images in formats for which plugins are avalible. Works with OpenGL 2.0 (use shaders to do most of rendering tasks) and OpenGL 1.x (but in a limited way - there is no support for GLSL)

iinfo - application that prints information about given images (sizes, resolution, color depth, info stored in exif tag)

iconvert - application that converts images from one format to another and change meta-data

idiff - application that "compares" images

igrep - application that search images for matching meta-data

Of course all applications decribed above can work with files in any format - if there is plugin for it. Currently supported format are: TIFF, JPEG/JFIF, OpenEXR, PNG, HDR/RGBE. In few days we add support for BMP and ICO - there are almost ready.

Are You courious why I choose this project? There were few reasons that attracted me to OIIO.

The first one was that library is truly multiplatform: curently works on Linux and OS X. I'm sure that in the near future one of the students will port it to the Windows - and I hope that it would be me! Number of potential users is huge;)

The second reason for choosing this project: the peoples that are developing OIIO. Workers of NVidia, Google and Sony Pictures ImageWorks. Who, if not them, can lead guys that want to enter into big world of OpenSource? They was working in IT branch longer than I'm on this world, so their experiences must be huge!

Third reason. OIIO is not a KDE, GNOME, ImageMagic or another big project. OIIO don't have milion lines of code (but I must admit that there is lot of code). There is still a lot to do - also easy things like minor bug fixes - it sound like it is good project for newbi:). I will write about thing that I done to show that I really want work on OIIO within GSoC in the next entry - You see how easy stuff that was.

The last reason was the license - BSD! I'm love it! This is one of the best license in the world. I'm true follower of the OpenSource programs, but I don't think that anybody who use Open code should be forced to show his code - because I love freedom!

So, if You're interested in OIIO - please go to the WikiPage and read about the library, ask questions on dev-list and user-list. Checkout the code and start fixing bugs:)

Hello everyone

2009-04-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

Hi!

My name is Robert and I am studying computer science (3rd year) at the University of Technology in Gdansk, Poland.

I created this blog for two reason. The first one is that I want to write about my adventure with OpenSource from the point of view of total newbi guy in this field. I want to describe how I started developing OpenSource program, what obstacles I met and how defeat them. Mayby it will be usefull for someone.

The second reason for creating this blog is that I want to describe my strugle with Google Summer of Code and OpenImageIO library. I'm not a GSoCer yet (and don't know if I'll be) - but I have something to share.

It's my first blog in english. So, forgive me my grammar, style or anything else that is connected with writind in this language. And please, write "bug fixes" of my mistakes in the comments:) I'll be glad for that!