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

quite a few browsers?

[infernalC]

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.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

This, this, a million times this. Basically the only widely-used browser that supports APNG is Firefox. Until IE and Webkit follow suit, APNG is a total non-starter.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Rhywden]

I don't see another lossless image format with alpha channel support and 8/24bit colour depth around, do you?

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Dwedit]

Because PNG beats the pants off of GIF in terms of file size.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[gl4ss]

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

uhh.. yeah I suppose you could hack in multi-bit transparency and higher color modes and better compression into gif now but .. eh, it wouldn't be gif then.

also, who cares about the authoring tool? that's hardly the problem, the problem is that if it doesn't work on every browser you might just as well embed a fucking video(of people fucking).

Re:quite a few browsers?

[wonkey_monkey]

24 (and higher) bit colour and full alpha channel transparency.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[mwvdlee]

My first thought exactly.
We don't need APNG creator tools, we need browser support first.

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?

[Rhywden]

Yes, I forgot to add "supported in all browsers capable of displaying images". I know there are more image formats out there.

However, this is about the image support in browsers. Thus your list makes no sense. Then again, this is slashdot where one has to list any and all qualifiers, just so you don't get jumped on because you didn't cover the use case the article wasn't about.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[ArsonSmith]

We don't need chickens we need eggs!!

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.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[aztracker1]

reduced palette png-8 comes pretty close to GIF, while offering palette colors that have transparency (not limited to a single transparent color), which makes it much better suited to most scenarios where you would use a gif or a png.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[aztracker1]

In the end, isn't fucking videos half of what people use the internet for outside of work.. well that and facebook/twitter.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[mwvdlee]

Let me restate;

With a number of APNG editor/creator tools readily available (http://littlesvr.ca/apng/), adding one more APNG generator isn't going to magically let people actually view these APNG files.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Kagetsuki]

There's a patch for Chrome/Chromium they've promised to accept if they see more widespread usage. Also may I point out that APNG gracefully degrades to PNG - so APNG will not actually break anything you'll just get the first frame on a browser that does not support APNG. In other words no "this site looks best in" required - just be aware that some browsers will only show the first frame.

It would be great to have a widely accepted standard from the get-go but that is something we do not have. APNG is the closest thing to an accepted standard and until we see wider usage we will not see wider adoption. And without better tools to handle it we most certainly will not see wider usage and thus this project. If you're sick of putting up with GIF or having to use JS/CSS hacks for animation would you not agree that APNG would be nice to have?

For one of our stretch goals we were considering implementing a jQuery plugin to dis-assemble and animate APNG images for browsers that do not support APNG. Since we would prefer having people use APNG and browser developers realize the demand and implement it themselves we decided not to include this. After implementing apngasm in CoffeeScript/JavaScript writing something like this would be trivial - would you like us to re-add this as a stretch goal?

Re:quite a few browsers?

[lvxferre]

Well, no wonders Firefox support it - accordingly to Wikipedia, APNG was created by two guys at Mozilla.

For other browsers... well, this kind of thing usually steamrolls (more use > more users > more browser support > more use), so the beginning is slow, but the animation tools in the article may help to boost it a bit.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[jimbo]

Even a few percent would save Google terabytes a day. That's why improvements to compression and protocols that seem quite insignificant to the end user are very popular at the host.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[KingMotley]

Because not all images are square. Objects that aren't square (like a star for example), if you wanted to place that star on a page, and didn't have alpha transparency, you could use GIF, but the edges would look weird because it's either all on or all off transparency which creates jaggy edges. With alpha transparency you can make the object's edges more transparent as it gets closer to the edge which will let it look right no matter what type of background you have. Of course there are many other uses, like semi-transparent effects, shadows, etc that aren't easily replicated another way.

These type things allow a webpage to reuse assets over and over across many pages, or in many different sections of the same page, which reduces the amount of image manipulation you have to do, and also reduces the size of the page which is more and more important as devices with low bandwidth become more prominent (like phones/tablets).

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Bobakitoo]

Look at the source of your demo. Each frame from the video (mp4, ogv) has colour on the top half and a mask on the bottom half. Then JavaScript is use to render them into a html canvas. This is neat, but far from the simplicity of embedding a PNG or APNG image. This is also very inefficient, a site that would use this hack to display animated icons would be horribly slow, especially on mobile platforms.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Kagetsuki]

Actually APNG is explicitly mentioned as a supported format for the image tag in the HTML5 spec.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/embedded-content-0.html#the-img-element
Search for "APNG".

Re:quite a few browsers?

[halltk1983]

Insignificant until you have 30,000 people a month pull it from your server. Then it's 60 MB saved, per pic at a tiny picture size. If you look at the top two, they're 52 and 57 KB. At the number of hits on that, it's 1.5 GB per picture, which starts to add up, even at that tiny number of hits. For a site that gets that per day? 450GB / month, which isn't a tiny number in bandwidth charges. That's $600 per year in bandwidth at many hosts, per picture (I know at that usage pattern they get special rates). That's just on the server side.

On the client side, what if they're on cell modems, in rural areas, sometimes on the 2G networks getting 110 kbps (that's bits, chief). Or satellite internet. Or anything that measures bandwidth used. I know my parents saved 5-25% bandwidth on all the images that were downloaded, it would make their satellite internet a hell of a lot more usable. Even on 3g, or in congested areas, it could make a difference.

The problem is size limits

[macemoneta]

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.

Re:The problem is size limits

[aliquis]

If only the network got faster and people was willing to accept bigger file sizes and RAM usage!

Re:The problem is size limits

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

PNG uses substantially better compression technology than GIF (a two pass algorithm with a pixel value predictor in the first and then compressing the errors after the first pass in the second using deflate, which combines LZ77 dictionary encoding and an adaptive huffman coder, versus straightforward LZW, which is only a dictionary coder), so this is not really true. You can achieve a lot more in a 1MB PNG than a 1MB GIF.

Re:The problem is size limits

[Andtalath]

The costs of good storage are still prohibitive.

MNG?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to the MNG version of PNG?

what happened to MNG?

[dmbasso]

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."

Re: what happened to MNG?

[Anonymous Coward]

Developer ego together with a healthy dose of "not invented here" syndrome is what happened. MNG was removed from Firefox by Stuart Parmenter "to save download size" (without libmng, the Firefox download would save 200 KB back in the days when Firefox was considered the "lean version" of Mozilla). He then proceeded to instead propose APNG with vlad to effectively replace the GIF standard for animation without relying on MNG by applying custom patches to libpng.

Needless to say, when Mozilla brought the APNG extension for ratification to the PNG people, they rejected it because a) PNG was "meant to store only one image" and b) MNG already existed as a standard to accomplish the very same goals by the same people. As a result, the official libpng distribution (and WebKit which depends on it) does not support APNG.

A few people tried to bridge the gap by proposing changes to APNG to placate the PNG people or allowing plugin discovery to work for tags as it does for tags, but these were both rejected by Mozilla in favor of backwards compatibility and, I assume, complexity reasons respectively, so I don't really see any reason why the gap will be bridged any time soon.

Re: What happened to MNG?

[grumbel]

MNG is not the correct solution, it's a solution looking for a problem. It's feature bloated and designed without any kind of thought put into how tools for it would work. It has support for sprites, tiling, fading, magnification, loops and a bunch of other stuff, none of which maps very well into the tools people actually use to produce animations. It's not so much an animated image format, but a language to write animations in.

The proper solution is video, WebM or whatever. Which makes no assumptions about how you structure your animation and instead simply tries to compress the resulting image sequence as best as possible. Or in case you actually need structured animation, you can use SVG which providers a much richer tool set then MNG and is full programmability via Javascirpt.

reddit

[1000101]

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.

Re:reddit

[brainnolo]

or 4chan...

Kickstarter: frenemy of free software

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Remember when

[suso]

Remember when creating high quality open source software didn't require a Kickstarter campaign?

Re:Remember when

[The Cat]

Why is it that you people bitch every time someone gets paid?

You fuckers destroyed the software industry. And now every time someone tries to get something going again you fucks show up and start crying like little bitches because someone is earning money for their hard fucking work.

If you don't want to invest in the project, then DON'T. You can download the source for free after the rest of us pay for it.

Kill all animated GIFs!

[pigiron]

Including improved ones..."

Re:Kill all animated GIFs!

[FatLittleMonkey]

And autoplay video. And scrolling/looping banners and sidebars. And blinky/noisy ads. And floating boxes. And pop-over subscription requests. Yes. Kill them all. I keep throwing matches at the screen, but they won't burn.

Kickstarter: friend of free software

[tuppe666]

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.

GIF /does/ support true colors

[Lord_Naikon]

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.

Put that effort into the browsers

[Midnight Thunder]

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)
 

plus gamma, so it lookd right on other systems

[raymorris]

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.

Re:'permanent' b/c of ppl like you

[globaljustin]

Because browsers suck, HTML sucks, Javascript sucks, CSS sucks and the web sucks unless you are using it to display text and a few images.

What, are you typing from 1996?

Netflix, smartphones, and hell even just a cursory reading of what the NSA can do to spy on us proves you wrong....

About the last part at least!

I agree that X, Y, and Z web coding laguages suck! Also flash sucks!

I'm trained as a network engineer. To me it's all stupid bullshit....like tags they put on clothes at the store to make you but them...

You know how some people keep the tag on their hat or w/e even after they buy it as 'style'?

That's what 90% of software looks like to me....I get where you're coming from...but the internet does pretty much everything now. Hell, you can do live HD TV broadcasts over the internet now.

The code is horseshit, but the hardware is so fast it doesn't matter....that's why it works...I hate it...I probably hate it as much as any human alive...but you're dead wrong about the internet's capabilities...in spite of shittily created coding languages to do it

The WHATWG is an example of a working group that would agree with you. They'r ethe ones who got HTML5 off the ground despite the WC3's best efforts