apngasm - FOSS Animated PNG tools and APNG standardization

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

by GravityWell • 13 years ago

46 23 13 years ago

kickstarter.com

boksiora• 13 years ago

i hope this project succeed

bloodorange• 13 years ago

I wish they had picked a name that wouldn't be odd when mentioned at work.

eli• 13 years ago

At the risk of sounding older than I am, I've noticed a lot of young developers these days give things cutesy or even risque names.

(Edit: Also, it seems that name was selected by the author of the original CLI program for APNGs, who does not appear to be involved in this kickstarter)

hackerboos• 13 years ago

There was a javascript library called Testacular but they seen sense and changed the name to Karma.

ohWhatever2• 13 years ago

I have always hated the tendency toward creating retarded adverbs, ever since people took to registering domains in the Libya country code TLD.

Now, we'r stuck with all these trendy sounding SaaS projects that have adopted some of the most irritating names imaginable.

I wish people would stop dreaming up stupid website domains like:

dork.ly

fart.ly

retard.ly (note that in most cases, it would take a small leap of imagination to choose "retarded" over "retard" in case like this, but that opportunity is often squandered)

adverb.ly

grammar.ly

and-so-on.ly

...even worse is when someone truly brainless comes along, and adheres to the trend, but registers under a .com TLD, and still botches the grammar of the word. as in:

botchedly.com

I have always hated these sorts of names.

rikacomet2• 13 years ago

I think we can go with words A.P.G. (same analogy as PNG, and JPG)

APG sounds more catchy.. just giving my nickels on the name, use it if you want.

This project is something I have been waiting for, like forever, the idea is very good, I hope the execution of this idea is good as well. Somehow I have high expectations (which is unusual for me for such works)

ohWhatever2• 13 years ago

I don't get it. What's wrong with the name?

Are you pronouncing it as if it were the verb, "aping", like as in "poorly imitating a person's behavior in the primitive manner of an ape"?

My inclination was to spell out the letters of the acronym, as in "A-P-N-G", like: Ay, Pee, En, Gee.

I don't think they were targeting a funny name. I wonder if they're fluent in English.

kbrackbill• 13 years ago

I think it's not APNG that's the issue but the kickstarter's name, "apngasm".

Dylan168073• 13 years ago

A Ping A S M?

Aping assembler?

I don't see much problem.

Millennium• 13 years ago

Right, and "Rather A Pokemon Emulator?" was completely, totally, in no way a backronym either.

derefr3• 13 years ago

A bit of history on this:

All APNG has ever really needed to build a sustainable momentum is--like most other web features--a plurality of web browser support. These days, that usually means "supported in both Firefox and Chrome." Until that happens, nobody has any reason to create APNGs, because you can't stick them in your cutesy forum signature and expect other people using the website to see what you see.

Firefox already has APNG support; Chrome is the hold-out here. It's mostly because Google only want to use the "official" libpng. libpng, though, is intentionally a minimalist reference implementation! The PNG group will never accept the APNG patches into the official libpng, because that would distract from libpng's purpose in being a reference for how to encode/decode PNGs. And Google don't want to apply the APNG patches themselves, because that means, basically, supporting their own fork of libpng.

In other words, what's really been needed this whole time isn't "better authoring tools" (create consumption tools, and authoring tools will follow) but rather for some large organization to get behind maintaining and supporting a regular release of "current libpng with apng patches." Big enough, at least, for Google to feel as confident in their work as they do the PNG group's.

The easy solution, of course, would be to split out the work Mozilla is already doing in maintaining their "current libpng with apng patches" from Gecko into a separate project, and let both Mozilla and Google (and Apple and Microsoft and whoever else) be consumers for that project. If there's anything to get done, it's that.

rikacomet2• 13 years ago

Umm, I'm not a techie, but these are my RAW thoughts:

- So you say, that APG (APNG) requires compatibility support from major browser and development support from a hard working organization, with relative financial support.

But what about, compatibility support in Photoshop, GIMP? I think the stretch goal amount should be spent on this, if anything. I don't want to try a new editor just for APG.

- One more suggestion I have is to make it as simple to use as Unfreez Program for creating GIF, which as simple as : 1. Drag and Drop 2. Type Delay time 3. Click "OK" to compile

http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/ (a very good program, damn simple to use for even a noob, only 19KB, I have used it for years to make animated GIF)

- Editing frames should be easy, but the whole program should not be as complex as animation software are supposed to be.

derefr3• 13 years ago

If enough people are looking for a way to create APNGs--that is, if there's demand for authoring tools--then the people who produce the authoring software will be incentivized to add support for the format on their own.

At first, it won't matter that it's difficult to create APNGs; like animated GIFs, one of the core strengths of APNG, given cross-browser support, is that they're inherently viral--you just right-click-save one to your desktop, and then you can stick it into any other app that expects an image (upload them to Imgur, drop them into Tumblr, use them as emoticons in a message in Gmail...) and they'll "just work."

The majority of people won't be authoring APNGs--just like the majority of people aren't authoring animated GIFs. Instead, most people will just be taking and resharing other people's APNGs. It could take a half-hour with ImageMagick to generate a valid APNG and it wouldn't matter, as long as you can take "translucent_pusheen_dance.png", stick it on your blog, and have it loop its cute little animation in full 32-bit RGBA glory.

As long as the original creator of the animation decided they would be better-served creating an APNG than an animated GIF, then everyone else will share and spread that APNG. But only if they can see it in their browsers, of course. The original creator won't care about the hassle of creating APNGs--we go through lots of hassles, as web-developers, to get things into arcane formats (e.g. spritesheets) so that clients can experience them slightly better. The content author's only consideration will be how many people can successfully see it, vs. what the quality of the thing they'll be seeing is. As soon as APNG can be seen in every browser animated GIFs work in, it'll be equal on one criteria, and beat GIFs hands-down on the other. But not until then.

mjn• 13 years ago

The PNG group's noninclusion of APNG support in libpng isn't entirely due to simplicity, but partly to philosophical disagreements: they consider single-image and multiple-image formats inherently different, and believe they should be supported separately rather than mashed together. Many of the same group officially developed and support MNG as the officially standardized multi-image format related to PNG. And they do have a reference implementation of that, libmng: http://libmng.com/

Alas, both have stalled: MNG was initially implemented by Mozilla but later dropped, and the PNG/MNG folks consider APNG a hackish substitute so are unlikely to standardize or support it.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

Seems to me that animated WebP would be better for short video sequences (3-6 seconds) than APNG anyway. People are dumping animated GIFs all over social networks now, and a lot of them weigh in at anywhere from 300k to 2MB, which is somewhat ridiculous, especially on mobile.

However, Google (Blink) themselves rejected WebP animation (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57594084-93/blink-leaders-r...) due to performance concerns.

Which brings up an interesting dilemma, which is balancing network performance with CPU or rendering performance.

We need a format that's optimal for mobile network transport, optimal for decoding speed, and optimal for rendering and memory. ;-)

derefr3• 13 years ago

Animation and video are different things.

Here's an animated GIF used for animation: http://i.imgur.com/rwUt664.gif

Here's an animated GIF used for video: https://mediacru.sh/demo

Obviously, in the video case, a real video format wins, and if social networks let us upload videos with the same filesize cap they allowed for images, you'd start to see short videos used in place of GIFs.[1]

However, in the animation case, video-encoding wouldn't even work--videos don't have alpha-layers, after all. In this case, animated GIFs are currently the only solution--and APNGs would be a decided improvement.

---

[1] This has only just become possible for video formats, though, so some latency in implementing a policy change like this is to be expected. Until recently "video on the web" meant Flash, and Flash content didn't have any of the viral properties of images; you couldn't just right-click a Flash <embed> to save the FLV from it, then upload it somewhere else and expect it to work. We do have that now with HTML5 <video> elements, but they're still pretty rare, and as long as there isn't a place to take the tiny-little-video-files from, nobody will have them to re-upload them to anywhere else.

Camillo• 13 years ago

It's going to be great when users post APNGs with a first 1/30s frame that shows Mickey Mouse's face and a second permanent frame that shows hardcore porn. And your moderator uses a browser that doesn't support APNG, so they just see the innocuous frame and have no idea about the rest.

Automatic fallback to a normal static PNG is a terrible idea. If you want an animation format, give it its own extension and MIME type. The only reason why it works for GIF is that it's basically assumed to be animated nowadays, and it started out with animation support (as far as the web is concerned).

Dylan168073• 13 years ago

You can already do things like that with gamma. To say nothing of embeds allowing file substitution.

I don't see why fallback is bad. Having a single canonical file is so much nicer than multiple files. APNG has been around for ages. If you as an upload-accepting web dev aren't aware of it you're not a very good web dev. And as a user you don't even know what container an image is using 99% of the time, so MIME type doesn't matter. Browsers tend to ignore image MIME anyway because of how common mislabelings are.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

I used to run and code an image posting site. It took me all of half an hour to add a feature to the admin section that showed every frame of an animated image when posted using the image magick library from PHP. So this isn't a particularly difficult problem from a moderation perspective. Silent bans and contagious bans took a lot more coding (banning someone such that they don't know their posts are no longer visible, and banning someone automatically if they've posted a banned image or have a cookie from a pervious ban, etc..).

I hate APNG personally, though, because I think MNG makes a lot more sense. The server can return what is appropriate based on standard HTTP content negotiation with that. APNG is just a stupid hack and the only reason Mozilla went with it instead of MNG is because is saves 100KB in the browser binary, which I couldn't care less about.

kunil• 13 years ago

Yes, bring animated gifs back to the web again!

Grue3• 13 years ago

Animated GIF is an abomination. I wish APNG would take over. All that's needed is a tool that would convert APNG to GIF server side for browsers that don't support APNG. Thus Firefox users will enjoy better image quality, and Chrome users will have to either switch or enjoy the crapness of GIF image format until Google implements APNG support too.

apngasm - FOSS Animated PNG tools and APNG standardization

Related Stories