Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
I knew it was going to happen eventually... I have just upgraded to IDL 6.3 (Windows 32-bit) and the IDLtoAVI DLM no longer works. I did the same thing I have done for several version upgrades now. I copied IDLtoAVI.dll and IDLtoAVI.dlm from IDL62\bin\bin.x86 to IDL63\bin\bin.x86, started the new version and tried to run the DLM. I got a message about IDL32.dll not being found on the path. I noted that there is a copy of IDL32.dll in IDL62\bin\bin.x86 but not in IDL62\bin\bin.x86, so I copied that over too, restarted and tried again. I didn't seriously expect that this would work, and it didn't: IDL gave and error message about a bad entry point and crashed. I presume this is related to the introduction of 64-bit Windows. If Google and I remember correctly, the IDLtoAVI DLM was created in March 2002 by Ronn Kling, using call_external DLL code first posted by Oleg Kornilov in December 2001. (See the thread entitled "AVI reader/writer dll available".) More recently Oleg updated his code and posted the DLL to the User Contributions area of the RSI site (though offhand I'm not sure exactly where). In Jan 2005, in a message entitled "Desperately seeking AVI source code", I asked if the source code was available, but got no response. So now the evil day has come, it is time to raise this issue again. Are you there Oleg? Can you share the source code? If you don't want to (which I quite understand) can you make it available to someone to build a new DLM? Is anyone willing to do this? You non-Windows people are probably wondering what the fuss is about. The IDLtoAVI DLM is a simple but effective, Windows-only tool for creating AVIs. I have messed about with creating animations from IDL and this is by far the most effective way I have found. Mark Hadfield