Smacker was designed with the following goals in mind:
Smacker was created to playback 256 color data. Bink is an awesome 24-bit color codec and it much higher quality than Smacker, but it's not realistic for all markets - lower-end niches such as education just can't rely on 24-bit video modes. Smacker was designed, from start to finish, as an 8-bit compressor just to address this lower-end market.
Smacker was created with developers in mind. Most compressors are trying to be everything to everyone. Smacker is most useful to people who are going to be redistributing Smacker files with a game, multimedia product, or demo. There are specific features in Smacker that will be useful only to developers. There will be non-developers that buy Smacker - and that's great - but the product was primarily designed for developers.
Smacker should allow you to selectively touch up a compressed animation. Like most other compressors, Smacker has several levels of compression, from super-high compression with lower quality, to moderate compression with perfect quality. However, unlike other compressors, Smacker lets you compress your animation to the highest levels, then go back and touch up the areas that lost too much quality!
Compression time is irrelevant - playback speed should always override compression speed. Smacker is designed to playback its compressed animations as quickly as possible. To playback rapidly, I moved all of the thinking out of the playback utility and into the compressor. That said, Smacker does compress about the same speed as does Indeo and Cinepak, but it certainly isn't real-time. Smacker will currently compress at the rate of 8 to 20 frames per minute depending on your machine speed. This could always change however - if I discovered a change that sped up decompression but slowed down compression, I'd add it in a second.
Smacker will be used by people who know what they are doing. When asked who will use Smacker, I always respond with "people like me." Smacker was written as a utility that I would use. It is extremely tunable - both the compressor and the playback utility have many options that allow them to be adjusted to your animations. You aren't required to use or learn all of the options, but they are there, in case you need them. I'll explain when and where to use these options, but feel free to experiment as much as possible. I think you'll find that superior compression is as much of an art as it is a science.
Hopefully, after you've used Smacker, you'll agree that Smacker meets these goals.
Smacker is an excellent tool for people trying to:
Increase the resolution of their animations. Smacker can playback higher resolutions than other players because it takes much less CPU time to blit 8-bit data onto the screen.
Playback their animations on multiple platforms. Smacker (and Bink) is available for all of the PC platforms as well as for Macintosh and PowerMac. This allows you to target multiple platforms with one file format.
Create better quality compressed animations. Smacker will compress 8-bit source data with much higher quality than other codecs. So if your input data is 8-bit, then Smacker is definitely what you need.
Playback their animations faster. Since Smacker has much less data to read as your animation is played back, Smacker can playback almost all animations faster than other players.
Playback their animations predictably off CD-ROMs. Smacker (and Bink) has easy-to-use, data-rate-matching features that let you quickly create the best possible animation for a given device speed. During playback, Smacker streams your data off the CD-ROM and handles audio-video synchronization automatically by dropping frames when necessary.
Add sound to their animations. Smacker supports sound playback under DOS, Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT, Macintosh and PowerMac.
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