DPX image format?

[kleer001]

Is there any way to get Houdini to recognize and be able to use DPX image files? It's a pretty old format. I was surprised to learn recently that Houdini doesn't know about it.

[symek]

For some mysterious reasons Houdini had never supported it, unlike cineon - and for a fun part - they are almost the same thing. Unfortunately because of Cineon business collapse, it is dpx despite being older which had spread across the globe. We ended up with dead thing and without something being useful and common (we still get dpxs from DI from time to time) . It was RFE'ed hundreds of times without respond. It must be something like 'my cat has eaten dpx file and died' thing I suppose... Beside writing own plugin you can't do much. You can copy/paste code from OIIO, but maintaining it for HDK (recompilation for new builds) isn't fun. 

[malexander]

DPX is a nightmare format to support, and as far as I know, no one actually supports the entire spec. It seems like most implementations only support the Cineon container portion. The rest is madness - like someone went spec crazy at Kodak trying to support every possible image use case under the sun. Anyway, we looked into it many years ago and passed on it in favour of EXR.

[symek]

My cat theory was wrong? Bummer. 

It's rarely a problem these days (at least for us), but few year back it was major problem, so I could totally live with partial implementation.