xv

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xv
xv running on Linux
Developed by	John Bradley
Latest release	3.10a / 1994-12-29
OS	Unix-like, VMS
Genre	Image viewer
License	Shareware
Website	www.trilon.com/xv/

Xv is also a common abbreviation for the X video extension.

xv is a shareware program written by John Bradley to display and modify digital images under the X Window System.

While popular in the early 1990s (perhaps then the dominant Unix image viewer), it has become dated and no official releases have been made since December 1994. Bradley was unable to negotiate the LZW licence necessary for decoding the then-popular GIF format.

Until at least 2000, Bradley collected third-party updates to xv, for example support for the PNG image format. These were published as source code patches only. Additional patches are still (in 2007) created and maintained by volunteers.

xv can be run from either the command line or through a graphical interface. It is similar to ImageMagick in many ways, although it has a few features that ImageMagick and The GIMP lack, while lacking features that these programs do have^{[citation needed]}.

xv is still present in Slackware Linux 11.0 and SUSE Linux 10.0, although it is no longer bundled with most distributions as several free alternatives exist.