apngasm (Animated PNGs) FOSS


There was this pic once that was a jpg but when I loaded it in firfox it turned out to be animated. Is was far less laggy than a GIF so I see the appeal of this.
 
EssoAir said:
There was this pic once that was a jpg but when I loaded it in firfox it turned out to be animated. Is was far less laggy than a GIF so I see the appeal of this.
Click to expand...
I kind of hate to break it to you but what you saw really was an animated GIF, it simply had it's extension renamed to .jpg. Any improvement you think there was has nothing to do with the format. It is entirely within the GIF specification to have video fluid 30fps animations, they just get quite large the more frames there are.
 
but when I renamed it .gif to see if it would play without needing firefox it didnt work at all. it was weird...
 
Then whatever you were trying to load it in didn't support whatever it was doing. Trust me, there's no such thing as animated jpeg, it was definitely a gif.
 
Sounds like a good idea. We should really get rid of GIF, it's an outdated image format. Its patents are no longer an issue, but it still sucks because it only supports 8-bit color and 1-bit alpha, which is kind of insane in 2013.
 
MNG is/was too complex to be accepted. That was the reason for APNG development

_wb_ said:
We should really get rid of GIF, it's an outdated image format. Its patents are no longer an issue, but it still sucks because it only supports 8-bit color and 1-bit alpha, which is kind of insane in 2013.
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yup, especially the alpha channel sucked. A pixel could either be 100% transparent or 0%. APNG has a full range of transparency. Its the feature that excites me the most, giving you the possibility to create awesome looking animations : ) 

(I simply had to back it) xD
 
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ok just have read what apng is and it's history. it's nice but still bastardizing the png standard. but i can see the advantage over mng.
 
well, I did not look at how they actually work. Its an opinion for the little adoption of mng and the reason (or one of the reasons) APNG was developed

I'd like both to be better supported!

'crow_riot said:
ok just have read what apng is and it's history. it's nice but still bastardizing the png standard. but i can see the advantage over mng.
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The native support in some browsers is an advantage (Firefox, Safari, there are probably more). Firefox can't open MNG's. Having a good tool for creating APNGs is also kinda nice. I should try some mng tools though.
 
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_wb_ said:
Sounds like a good idea. We should really get rid of GIF, it's an outdated image format. Its patents are no longer an issue, but it still sucks because it only supports 8-bit color and 1-bit alpha, which is kind of insane in 2013.
Click to expand...
Actually it does support full colour but no one uses it since it ramps up the filesize and worse still people are under the impression that it only supports 8bit colour and so don't support more than that in their apps.
The point about alpha is valid though.


(You can google full colour gif... I'm on my phone so tricky to link)
 
PokeParadox said:
_wb_ said:
Sounds like a good idea. We should really get rid of GIF, it's an outdated image format. Its patents are no longer an issue, but it still sucks because it only supports 8-bit color and 1-bit alpha, which is kind of insane in 2013.
Click to expand...
Actually it does support full colour but no one uses it since it ramps up the filesize and worse still people are under the impression that it only supports 8bit colour and so don't support more than that in their apps.
The point about alpha is valid though.


(You can google full colour gif... I'm on my phone so tricky to link)
Click to expand...
There are tricks to make full color GIFs (basically by tiling the image in blocks that don't use more than 256 colors each), but clearly the format was not designed with full color in mind. So I wouldn't say GIF "supports" full color, but rather that there are tricks that allow you to encode a full color image in a GIF in a way that works in some applications.
 
Of course it's part of the GIF spec, otherwise the trick wouldn't work at all! (unless implementations would not follow the spec)

But it's clear that the GIF format was not meant/designed to be used like that: it's easy to get a GIF file that is larger than the corresponding raw RGB data, which does not make sense for a file format that is supposed to do compression.

Anyway, I think we agree that it is obsolete and PNG/APNG are the way to go :)
 
stardroid said:
Kickstarter campaign which aims at providing a good FOSS tool to create APNGs (like .gifs, just better)!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374397522/apngasm-foss-animated-png-tools-and-apng-standardi

its totally cool,  ; )

so check out those demos:

http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_vs_apng.html

https://people.mozilla.com/~dolske/apng/demo.html
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Why these demos not working for me, only the GIF animates?

Tried in Opera/Chrome/IE10.

Are these APNG better than animated SVG for use on webs?
 
(A)PNG are raster graphics (pixel-based) while (animated) SVG are vector graphics. They both have their uses: SVG is very useful if you need to scale things to a wide variety of resolutions, but it's overkill if you only need a relatively low-res version anyway (like on a web page), and if you don't have vector source material anyway, it's kind of pointless to use SVG.

I'd say APNG is mostly useful for small animations where you want lossless compression (otherwise you can just as well use MPEG or any other movie format) and/or transparency. For large animations you're probably better off with something like FFV1. Also, many kinds of simple animations (e.g. rotation, scaling, color changes etc) can be done directly and much more compactly with CSS3, so it's better to use that if possible.
 
Cheers. yeah CSS3 offers some very nice basic animations/effects.

I'll have to look into APNG more I think
 
FZERO said:
Why these demos not working for me, only the GIF animates? Tried in Opera/Chrome/IE10.
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Unfortunately the Blink based Opera needs a Pulginn, not the old one. Chrome still waits for a patch (enableing APNGs) to be acceptet. IE is no suprise

Firefox, SeaMonkey and Iceweasel work a treat
 
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stardroid said:
Unfortunately the Blink based Opera needs a Pulginn, not the old one. Chrome still waits for a patch (enableing APNGs) to be acceptet. IE is no suprise
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This is the real problem with APNG: no one is making serious moves to support it. If Microsoft flat out refuses to incorporate it then that's a very large chunk of users that won't be able to see pretty animations, and Google is dragging their heels for whatever reason and may never completely support it either.This kickstarter could reach millions of dollars and produce all kinds of tools for producing APNGs but it won't make a lick of difference 70% of the internet can't view them.
 
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