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."

Comments

Re:quite a few browsers?

[mwvdlee]

Couple of reasons
1. Better compression.
2. 24-bit support (still with pretty good compression).
3. 8-bit alpha channel with 24-bit RGB.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

BMP, TIF, TGA, EXR, WEBP, various 'raw' formats.

Each of which are either stupidly larger than PNG, require decoders with much larger memory footprints to account for all the features of the format that are entirely useless in a web browser (this is supposed to be a format for the web, not a goddamned CMYK printing press), or are blindly hated due to being supported by one or more Evil-Companies-Of-The-Month(tm). Nice try, though.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[CTachyon]

Why is PNG needed any more, anyway? It was only developed because of Unisys patents. GIF patents expired years ago.

The LZW patents were the impetus for PNG, but PNG is superior in every possible way... except that PNG skipped animation, because animated GIFs didn't seem like an important use case to support. (As I recall, their primary use at the time was badly pixelated spinning red alarm lights on Geocities pages.)

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Fnord666]

From the Kickstarter page:

What about MNG?

If APNG is a screwdriver MNG is a Swiss Army Knife with all sorts of little tools, one of which being a screwdriver head that is sort of awkward and difficult to use. MNG has a lot of compelling features that sound great but the reality is all these features made MNG difficult to implement. MNG isn't a simple [screwdriver] "frame based" format. Instead it has a bunch of small embedded tools [Swiss Army Knife] to create animations. For example it contains individual image objects/sprites and these are manipulated through some sort of animation instruction system that is embedded in the image - and variations of sprites are stored as delta fragments, and there's additional support for these fragments to be in transparent JPG which is a questionable standard on its own and seems self defeating in a PNG based standard...? If you want just a frame based animated image APNG does the job and is simpler, if you want a complex format that has individual image fragments and scripted action then SVG+SMIL is your solution; MNG is too complex to outdo APNG and too inflexible to outdo SVG+SMIL.