FreePV - Opensource panorama viewer

Goal: a powerful and truly cross platform viewer for panoramic images, both on your harddrive and inside web pages.

Status

FreePV is still in its early development state, however standalone viewers and plugins for Unix and Windows are already available. It is currently the best way to view QTVR files on Unix computers.

Current features

• Hardware accelerated rendering for smooth viewing experience, based on OpenGL
• Display of cubic and cylindrical panoramas (raw image files)
• Good support for QTVR panorama files (including more exotic features such as compressed headers)
• Standalone and Mozilla/Firefox plugin available
• Unix plugin registers for quicktime files, and plays panoramas on pages designed for Quicktime, PangeaVR and GLPanoView plugins.

Limitations

• Rendering of the windows mozilla plugin is not very smooth (will be improved soon)
• Equirectangular panorams not yet supported
• Display of cylindrical panorams currently of low quality (will be improved soon)
• Hotspots and multi node QTVR files not supported
• No scripting support

Installation

Linux

Download the source package. Currently, no prebuild packages are available. Hugin can be build with the usual

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install 

process. For building, the following packages are required (including development packages!):

• OpenGL (Mesa3D or other)
• glut or freeglut
• libjpeg
• zlib
• mozilla or firefox development package

Windows

Download the windows .zip file The windows package contains the standalone viewer (freepv-glut.exe) and the mozilla plugin (nsFreePV.dll). Copy the plugin dll to the Firefox plugin directory, typcially c:\Program Files\Firefox\Plugins, or similar. The standalone viewer, freepv-glut.exe, can be placed anywhere. Simply drop a panorama file onto the viewer icon to display it.

Usage

Currently only basic functionality of a viewer is supported. The following parameters can be added to the <embed> or <object> tags used to a panoramic image in a web page. The same parameters can be specified on the command line when invoking the standalone viewer.

• src=url Specify panorama file, either a Quicktime mov or a jpeg file
• quality=(low|medium|high) specify the render quality used. A lower render quality might improve the responsiveness of the viewer. Default is high. The low quality setting is optimized for software rendering with MESA (OpenGL implementation for Unix).
• cube_front=url Specify the front face of a cubic panorama
• cube_right=url Specify the right face of a cubic panorama
• cube_back=url Specify the back face of a cubic panorama
• cube_left=url Specify the left face of a cubic panorama
• cube_top=url Specify the top face of a cubic panorama
• cube_bottom=url Specify the bottom face of a cubic panorama

All parameters can also be specified in a configuration file in the home directory of the user, ($HOME/.freepv, under unix). The configuration file overwrites any parameters specified in the webpage or the command line. This is especially useful for specifying the render quality, since it doesn't make much sense to hardcode this into the webpage.

View an example how FreePV can be used to view 6 cubefaces.

Example command line usage for viewing a QTVR file with low rendering quality:

$ freepv-glut quality=low src=my_panorama.mov 

Support and mailing lists

The FreePV-devel list is currently the place to contribute or comment on the FreePV development.

Credits

• Pablo d'Angelo (Main developer)
• Thomas Rauscher (glut standalone viewer)
• Brian Greenstone (base for QTVR parser)
• Fulvio Senore (prototype of mozilla plugin)