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Expansion on future support for GIF: MNG/APNG?

posted
Total Posts
15

Is adding animated PNG support an idea worth implementing?

Yay
30
71.43%
Nay
12
28.57%
Total votes: 42
This is a feature request. Feature requests can be voted up by supporters.
Current Priority: +12
--K--
37 posts
Joined December 2009
Topic Starter
--K--
GIF support is definitely a good idea (one that I hope doesn't get abused), but sometimes GIF's palette limits just won't cut it. MNG/APNG don't really seem to get enough love, but they're definitely useful for certain images that would look nasty with dithering.
This request plays off of one of the planned uses for GIFs: Storyboard animation without using individual PNGs for each frame. Seeing as MNG is essentially a series of PNG images, it seems like quite a natural fit. If osu! is going to implement animated images to do away with having to create several individual PNG images as frames, supporting MNG would certainly make sense.

Thoughts? Issues? Concerns? Surprised formats for animated PNGs exists? Insistent on the notion that no animated image needs more than 256 colors and those that do can go dither themselves? Doubtful that tools to make animated PNGs are commonplace? Fire away.

see also: A discussion on the merits of Portable Network Graphics Animated Sequence with an endorsement from Dr. Ivo Robotnik
anonymous_old
0 posts
Here since the beginning
anonymous_old
Just split the MNG.

I'm sure we could benefit from the extra compression, but really, that'd be the only difference. I'm not sure if the .NET libraries currently in use have support for either MNG or APNG, so there would need to be more dependencies as well (which isn't really a good thing).
mm201
osu! Alumni
4,495 posts
Joined August 2008
mm201
APNG is a hack.

MNG deserves more love. I have no idea why Firefox ditched it in favour of APNG.

Support for animations in MNG format. It makes them more portable and keeps your folder less cluttered.
[deleted user]
[deleted user]
PNG was designed to be extensible format, from the beginning. So how APNG is a hack? It's just another extension, perfectly valid.

Sure MNG can be compressed a bit better, but the price is huge complexity. Flash is complex too, but you have a big brand-name application to manage that complexity. MNG developers never attempted to write such application, so all that complexity is completely unmanageable, for a regular user. Programmers can manage it everything using libmng, but regular users have no tools.

APNG is very simple, completely manageable, and still provides a decent compression.
mm201
osu! Alumni
4,495 posts
Joined August 2008
mm201
What are you talking about?

"Regular users" will use an image/animation program which supports whichever format they're using. There's nothing complex about it. And yes, programmers will use libmng. So what's the problem again?
[deleted user]
[deleted user]
There are no such animation program that could manage all the MNG features and parameters. That's the problem.

Regular user would need a program that loads MNG, shows the complex structure (sprites, loops, etc) in nice clean GUI, allows you to tweak all that, and saves it back as MNG.

On the other hand, if all you need is a simple image sequence in a loop, then APNG is enough.
FrozenOG
416 posts
Joined October 2009
FrozenOG
apng already has support; well online if thats what you mean
ziin
2,632 posts
Joined January 2010
ziin
A) We don't need stupid flashing animated avatars on osu.
B) APNG is backwards compatible with all modern browsers, and works as currently intended.
C) MNG is a broken and deceased format that I truly wish were used more, but did not get sufficient support from developers. Gimp, for example, works fine with MNG on linux, but has never worked on Windows. When GIMP, Photoshop, and Paint.net fail to support a format natively, it will never catch on. I would have embraced MNG if it ever worked for me.

APNG is a hack akin to netscape's gif format which allows animation. It is in every way superior to gif except that it lacks a decent editor. However, it has much better support than MNG, despite being inferior.

We don't need apng or mng support in osu. jpg and png supply 99% of our needs, and not many people care about compression.
mm201
osu! Alumni
4,495 posts
Joined August 2008
mm201
The original request was for storyboards, not avatars.
RBRat3
osu!painter
762 posts
Joined April 2010
RBRat3
I would love to see apng support in skinning to notch up the epileptic factor XD, Fuuny enough I did slap an apng in osu to see if magic would happen but it was a no go :<

Never played with MNG's but APNG's are stupid easy to put together without the need for support in editors if you take the export each frame route with an external app to put it together.( Its not any more difficult than putting a sliderball sequence together)

B) APNG is backwards compatible with all modern browsers, and works as currently intended.
apngs dont work in chrome or IE (by itself)

And for shits and giggles..
SPOILER
Last edited by RBRat3 , edited 1 time in total.
Baron Nefarious
108 posts
Joined April 2012
Baron Nefarious
I hear a lot of good stuff about animated pangs I've never actually seen one.

Edit: @below- no, I have honestly never seen one. I was a chromefag when I had a working computer and now I'm a mobilefag.
Last edited by Baron Nefarious , edited 1 time in total.
RBRat3
osu!painter
762 posts
Joined April 2010
RBRat3
Well the spoiler box above I posted 2 slider ball sequences. (Wont work in chrome or IE)
Like with every format theres pros and cons, You probably already seen one its just so obscure its mistaken for a gif.

Heres a huge one doing an alpha loop.
SPOILER

AFAIK FF and Opera are the last of the Mohican's to support apngs native.
ziin
2,632 posts
Joined January 2010
ziin
ff and opera are the first of the mohicans to support apng.

The only thing that apng has over png is compression. I can't see apng ever being supported by osu for any reason. There are other, better ways to do animation, even if apng is more compressed than an imagestrip.

In fact, osu already supports a significantly better format for animated images: h.264 and/or xvid in videos.

RBRat3 wrote:

You probably already seen one its just so obscure its mistaken for a gif.
my avatar is an apng
Kitsunemimi
2,188 posts
Joined April 2009
Kitsunemimi
apng actually seems somewhat logical for storyboarding (I don't want to look in my folders and find clusters or the same images in animations), however, I'd still consider it a format that has a long way to go. Lack of a decent editor or something that can put them together well is a primary reason. RBRat3, you may say that it's easy to put them together, however it's not easy at all when you're dealing with alpha and moving shapes. At least, that is unless you don't use any compression/optimization.

Regardless, since apng is still quite uncommon currently, I doubt many osu! sb'ers even know what it is/how to use it. Even for the ones that do, I'm thinking that most of them will still just stick to plain .png animation sequences, for the sake of familiarity. In short, apng is great, but it's not widely used enough to warrant support to be implemented.
jemhuntr
933 posts
Joined February 2012
jemhuntr
bump! okay I bumped this for the skinning part~
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