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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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."

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?

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.