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New Animated PNG Creation Tools Intend To Bring APNG Into Mainstream Use
Kagetsuki writes "While grainy GIF images can have entertaining uses, they aren't the ideal animated image format due to lack of full color support and an alpha channel [for varied transparency]. Animated PNG doesn't have these faults and has been available and incorporated in quite a few browsers since roughly 2004. Lack of tools and recognition has hurt adoption, so to remedy this there is a campaign on Kickstarter to create an Open Source, high quality Animated PNG [APNG] conversion library and GUI Editor based on the APNG Assembler tool 'apngasm.' Even the primary goal includes libraries/modules for C/C++ and Ruby along with a cross platform GUI authoring tool. Aside from supporting the project simply using APNG willl help raise interest and support in the standard and bring us one step closer to a world with cleaner animated images."
Animated PNG support is terrible... see:
http://caniuse.com/apng
No IE, no Chrome, Opera dropped it when they went to Webkit, no iPhone, no Android...
looks like it's pretty much only available on 20%ish of desktop browsers and pretty much nothing mobile. You aren't going to get anyone to use it in a public-facing web application yet. Remember the days of "this site looks best in (Internet Explorer/Netscape/whatever)"... let's not do that again.
Maybe if the HTML 5 standard said that conforming user agents have to do this it would put a little more umph behind it. Of course, the standard seems to follow browser development in many cases now, not the other way around.
I guess chromium doesn't support APNG I went to the comparison site (http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_vs_apng.html) and saw animated gifs vs static APNGs.
Most sites that use animated GIFs have restrictions on size and dimensions (typically 500x500 1MB). The quality of APNG within those restrictions won't be any better.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
What happened to the MNG version of PNG?
From this 2004 story: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/08/28/2312256/presenting-apng-like-mng-only-better
"Unlike MNG, APNG is not a separate file format, but rather an extension to PNG. Thus, APNG images are just normal PNG images (with the .png extension) but can be animated. The system is fully backwards-compatable, so any program that can open a PNG image will be able to open an APNG image (though non-APNG viewers will only show the first frame). Vitally, the decoder just adds an extra few kilobytes onto a standard PNG decoder. APNG support is in the process of being checked into Mozilla. Hopefully, other programs will follow suit."
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
If they convince reddit to endorse it, the format will take off. That place probably links to more .gif files than any other site out there.
Just use embedded WebM video tags, sheesh. That is one of the main reasons they were adopted to HTML, and you will get smaller file sizes, better quality, and they are supported in more browsers. This is a no brainer.
Can someone explain why APNG would be preferable over MNG, besides wider application support? I haven't followed these projects closely, and it seems counterproductive to me to develop a new standard when an apparently serviceable one already existed.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
What APNG needs isn't more tools, it's a convincing use case where it trumps WebP. And more than everything, it needs browser support: APNG 17.45%, WebP 40.17% plus Safari in the "near future". Neither is enough (unless you want to triple-encode everything), which is why /gif will be /gif for some more years.
Animated GIFs haven't worked satisfactory in WebKit for years, they take forever to load and will bring some browsers to a crawl. How could we ever expect animated PNGs to work any better?
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I remember when people wrote free software because it scratched an itch. Kickstarter seems to be setting a trend where people won't write free software unless they get paid. (Or they will write it and refuse to release it unless they get paid). That's not FREE software, it's hostage software.
wait. i remember the rotating skull, and the repeating nuclear explosion, but i can't help but feel the internet is a better place without them.
Please note their $5,000 prize is a two-months' stay in Japan: Land of soy sauce... and Mothra.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
SWF is a much better file format for animated raster images. You can define an image, put it on the stage multiple times, and move it around and apply affine transformations to it. You don't need to store tons of raw pixel data.
It's also an inferior version of video, since if you're using an animated image to store short video clips, you don't get the benefit of motion compensation and strong compression.
Remember when creating high quality open source software didn't require a Kickstarter campaign?
Including improved ones..."
I'm curious - why not go with WebP instead? I haven't looked too closely at the format, licensing, burden on CPU/memory, etc.
I do however know from my own tests that it generally performs better than PNG and already has animation support (though the Chromium team has rejected supporting it last month due to performance issues - but they also don't support APNG out of the box, you have to get a plugin).
Or skip the 'animated image' stage altogether and go straight to video (though there's more concerns there, especially in terms of lack of transparency support).
Going with APNG (or MNG, or trying to hack higher bitdepths onto animated GIFs as some propose, especially for transparency) seems like a dubious sideways step, if not a step backwards.
( Asking for money to be thrown at it is another issue - but more power to them. )
n/t
I remember when people wrote free software because it scratched an itch.
There are talented individuals producing small free software, or joining organisation to produce larger software, and companies with real money able to contribute/create to free software. Is there no room in that for funding a group *itch*(sic), or helping an (group of) individuals scratch theirs who otherwise wouldn't be able to due to life commitments...software takes time and effort to create.
The bottom line is people produce free software for a whole host of reasons. I personally see money being a great reason, as do all those companies already contributing to free software. In reality its the most common one.
It's 2013! Even the Ruby fans have moved on, or gone back to PERL.
You are Wrong!
It's worth noting that GIFs may overlay multiple image blocks with separate color pallets, resulting in true color images.
The problem here is that some browsers (chrome) insert an artificial 0.1s delay between "frames".
Also if you can do this with GIF one has to wonder if APNG has actually any viability other than as a source format.
"doesn't have these faults"
How can not having a feature be a fault? Is my Arduino faulty since it does not support Silverlight?
It might be a shortcoming but it is not a "fault", it is by design.
As an AC said above, "You are Wrong!"
There is *absolutely* no technical reason that internetworked computers *must* use different mechanisms at the presentation layer. Absolutely no logical reason to have the standards be different for any reason.
In practice, due to economics or usability concerns, browser makers make their browsers to operate in ways to accomplish non-computing goals....branding.
Just because M$ tries to format lock users into M$ everything...even in their browser design...just because they are that evil doesn't mean that your premise is by default the logical conclusion.
The internet is what **we** make it! Accept that fact.
Thank you Dave Raggett
http://gimpchat.com/files/2_APNG-Glass.png
http://littlesvr.ca/images/thumbnails/apng.png
Ah'-pen-gaa-sum. Like this won't be used for pr0n.
Now stay off my lawn!
Have gnu, will travel.
APNGASM is what you get when you search for the Assessor's Parcel Number on a desirable piece of property and find out it's clean.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A quick search turned up this tool for converting animated GIFs to APNG:
http://gif2apng.sourceforge.net/
Sure it could probably be built on and improved, but the real issue are the browsers. I just checked on MacOS X with Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari. Of those browsers only Firefox and Opera supported APNG.
The kickstarter should, IMHO 'focus' on:
- APNG awareness (available converters, creation tools, viewers, etc)
- Getting key websites to support it. I am thinking of sites such as Tumblr.
- Pushing for support in other main-stream browsers (IE, Safari, Google Chrome)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You know what would be better than animated png images? Not having animated images.
http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_vs_apng.html
Please don't make the ridiculous assumption that there was EVER some uniform spoken language that people were supposed to understand.
ALL people are unique and interpret language according to their own experiences and their own characteristics. There was never a situation where two people shared a common language. so please don't propagate this myth that writers are supposed to target a common standard. There will never be a common standard since all readers will be different.
Authors should always target your work for individual audiences, since every browser is different, and will be forever.
Pro-tip: It is fine to ignore 80% of the browser audience if that means 20% are going to have an increased loyalty to your product because you did something extra for them. The worst thing is for 100% of the audience to find your words merely ok.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
PNG also includes gamma information, which add. just one byte to file and makes a noticeable difference when the viewer's system has a different default gamma than the creators.
never heard of animated PNGs until i read this post. thanks for sharing. will read the link for more info
Is anybody going to send $$$ so that our browsing is once again 'enahnced' with 'hilarious' animated graphics? I doubt it.
Can we donate to STOP this happening?
Surely this is the worst kickstarter project ever.......
There's an APNG mod for VirtualDub. And guess what? It's free and open source. Frame stitching folks! Once you figure out how it works, it's really not that hard!
Problem solved (at least on Windows at the moment, I'm sure other video encoders could handle it too)... Next!
*And no, you don't need to make yet another special program to do all the animation stuff. The majority of animation, 3D rendering, and video editing software that are worth using can output to sequenced frames.
I just had an apngasm reading this
If it's animated, it's a movie. I don't see why we need to overload our image formats with movie features. If you're going to show a movie, use a movie format, and stop pretending its a static image. This crap may have made sense back when Compuserve was bigger than the Internet, but that was a long time ago.
Name me one reason why a movie-format-pretending-to-be-a-static-image-format is a useful thing today.
If only the network got faster
Yeah, if only. The POTS network is still stuck at 50 kbps effective throughput, and a lot of local telcos appear not to be too eager to upgrade the remaining customers stuck on dial-up to DSL. Microwave is limited by investors wanting to see short-term earnings over long-term investment in cell tower construction or satellite launches.
Is there anything wrong with SVG? It supports animations, already has good editors, and is supported by most browsers although only some browsers support animation. I think everyone agrees that we don't need a new standard for something not frequently used.
How does one view WebM in Safari for OS X, Safari for iOS, or the new "plugin-free" IE 10 for Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Phone 8?
Of course that $1.99 is just a burger
That's not a valid comparison if your market includes children under legal working age, which is the case for (say) any video game not rated M or AO. A $1.99 burger doesn't cost $1.99 to a child; it costs one week of waiting for the parent's next scheduled trip to a fast food chain. A lot of parents are, for some irrational reason, far more willing to spend $1.99 on a burger than $1.99 on an application when it isn't the child's birthday or Christmas.
The downside of the donation button model is that few people actually use it.
Hence "lite" and "pro" versions of applications on Google Play Store, and the OUYA model where every game has a playable demo.
Linux, Apache, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla
All of these examples you give are libraries on which another product builds, namely Linux applications, the server side of web applications, GNOME applications, KDE applications, and the client side of web applications. Let me know when there's high-quality open-source entertainment software. In fact, a few Slashdot users, such as turbidostato, alexo, and Anonymous Coward, are under the impression that if video games can't be made free, video games shouldn't be made at all.
APNG is just a hack. Just kill it with fire.
Giving new meaning to "the A face"
Where's the incentive? We already have gif. Widely supported, well understood, sufficient for people's needs. Any benefits apng has over gif are marginal. 24 bit color? Who cares, especially with palettes. Transparency? Is the apng going to be floating around my web page? Do any of the video standards use the alpha channel?
No, gif is just fine. Quit pushing changes for the sake of change!
Nothing I guess...