Vliv, the Very Large Image Viewer for Windows
What is it ?
- Vliv is a Windows application that allows interactive viewing of gigantic TIFF images.
- Vliv is known to have successfully displayed a 121600x97280 image.
Requirements
- Microsoft Windows 2000/XP.
- 64 Megabytes of main memory.
- Fast hard disk is recommended.
- Fast processor is recommended.
Features
- Nice standard Windows interface.
- Pure C win32 application (does not require additional libraries like MFC).
- Scrolling through images by scrollbars or mouse.
- Multipage TIFF images can be treated as one multi-resolution image, allowing interactive nagivation in gigantic images (zoom/unzoom).
- Immediate display on loading.
- Handles LZW, CCITT, JPEG, ZIP and Packbits compression.
- Printing capability.
- Export current view to BMP file or clipboard.
- Loads images way too large for IrfanView, ACDSee and others viewers.
- Memory usage is very limited for all images (only visible parts needs to be loaded in memory).
- Leverages the advanced capabilities of the TIFF format such as tiling and pyramidal images.
- Conversion programs from non-tiled format to tiled are available on request (works on memory-limited machines).
Screenshots
Vliv displaying a 43200x21600 image (1km resolution of the whole earth -
see NASA's Blue Marble)
Vliv displaying a 32000x24000 multi-resolution fractal image.
Vliv displaying a 21725x17105 multiresolution Landsat image of Canada -
see Canadian Forest Service)
Applications
- The most obvious application is geospatial imagery.
- Computer generated images such as fractals or raytraced images can be calculated with very large dimensions and interactively displayed.
- Full size photomosaics.
Evaluation version
- Current version is 1.7.1
- Vliv is a shareware application. You can download the evaluation version here (243 892 bytes).
- The evaluation version displays a message above each tile, printing and exporting are disabled.
- Instructions for building the full image of the earth are available when registering (one file contains 6 resolutions - 1350x675 - 2700x1350 - 5400x2700 - 10800x5400 - 21600x10800 - 43600x21600).
- Shareware fee is 30$ (or 30 euros).
- Full source code is available for purchase.
Future
- Image manipulation (negate, greyscale conversion, channel splitting).
- Minimal Documentation.
- Your suggestions.
April 2004 - Frédéric Delhoume