Blinkenlights Movies

A Blinkenlights Movie is a simple text file that you can create with any text editor. The file starts with a single identifier line and then contains all the images of your movie (frames) one after the other.

Each frame starts with a @ followed by its delay time in milliseconds. @1000 equals 1 second. Following this comes the image.

Every image consists of 8 lines with 18 digits each. A 1 represents a switched-on lamp while a 0 stands for complete darkness.

You can use the Blinkentools utility programs to convert Blinkenlights Movies to GIF format and vice versa.

Example

Here an example of a very simple Blinkenlights Movie how it looks in the text editor and in action.

# BlinkenLights Movie 18x8

@200
000000000000000000
000011100011100000
000111110111110000
000111111111110000
000011111111100000
000000111110000000
000000001000000000
000000000000000000

@800
000011100011100000
000111110111110000
001111111111111000
001111111111111000
000111111111110000
000011111111100000
000000111110000000
000000001000000000

Implementation details

You may put any number of comment lines between the identification line and the first frame. They must be preceded by a # character.

The end of line my be a CR (ASCII 13), a LF (ASCII 10) or CRLF (ASCII 13 + ASCII 10). We recommend saving your file with LF.

Two frames may be seperated by one or more empty lines.