Animated PNGs?

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Rhino - 29 Oct 2005 19:29 GMT

I've heard that PNG files have the capability of storing sufficient
information to represent an entire animation, much like an animated GIF does
today but without the copyright/patent issues that GIFs represent.

Are there actually any animated PNGs in existence? If so, how could I find
some? I have a program that displays various image files using the ImageIO
classes and I'd like to see if it works with a real animated PNG.

Or are animated PNGs just a hypothetical thing at this point?

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Rhino

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Andrey Kuznetsov - 29 Oct 2005 23:26 GMT

> I've heard that PNG files have the capability of storing sufficient
> information to represent an entire animation, much like an animated GIF
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
>
> Or are animated PNGs just a hypothetical thing at this point?

Animated PNG = MNG

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Andrey Kuznetsov
http://uio.imagero.com Unified I/O for Java
http://reader.imagero.com Java image reader
http://jgui.imagero.com Java GUI components and utilities

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Roedy Green - 30 Oct 2005 08:06 GMT

On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 14:29:14 -0400, "Rhino"
<no.offline.contact.please@nospam.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :

>Or are animated PNGs just a hypothetical thing at this point?

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/mng.html

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Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

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Tim Tyler - 30 Oct 2005 15:17 GMT

Rhino <no.offline.contact.please@nospam.com> wrote or quoted:

> I've heard that PNG files have the capability of storing sufficient
> information to represent an entire animation, much like an animated GIF does
> today but without the copyright/patent issues that GIFs represent.

The GIF patent expired in 2003.

There is no copyright issue unique to GIFs.

"Gif Liberation Day"

- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3007862.stm

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Rhino - 30 Oct 2005 18:38 GMT

> Rhino <no.offline.contact.please@nospam.com> wrote or quoted:
>
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
>
> - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3007862.stm

Thank you for the informative link! I knew that the GIF copyright had
expired in the US but understood that it was still in effect in other
countries, including here in Canada. The article explained that the Canadian
copyright ended last year so I should be free to use GIFs to my heart's
content.

Unfortunately, the good folks at Sun don't appear to have provided a GIF
writer for ImageIO, despite the lapse of the copyright. Until someone can
point me to a GIF writer plugin for ImageIO or a transcoder that can convert
GIFs to another format, I still have no way to create a GIF with ImageIO
short of coding my own writer or transcoder. I'd really prefer to avoid
that!

Any suggestions?

This is not a big deal for me at the moment; I really just wanted to write
out some GIFs that I was reading in some diagnostic code to prove that the
GIF was being correctly read and parsed by my code. Still, the need to write
GIFs to files (either as GIFs or in some other format) could arise at any
time so it would be nice to have a solution ;-)

Rhino

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JScoobyCed - 31 Oct 2005 03:05 GMT

> Unfortunately, the good folks at Sun don't appear to have provided a GIF
> writer for ImageIO, despite the lapse of the copyright. Until someone can
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>
> Any suggestions?

J2SE 6 imageIO will have a GIF reader/writer:
http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/api/javax/imageio/package-summary.html

or
http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs

Note: this is still a development version.

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JSC

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Andrew Thompson - 01 Nov 2005 09:40 GMT

> J2SE 6 imageIO will have a GIF reader/writer:
> http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/api/javax/imageio/package-summary.html

...hmmm. :-)

...

> Note: this is still a development version.

Yeah, but.. there might be two reasons Sun would withdraw
support for writing the form of GIF's they are describing here.
<http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/api/javax/imageio/package-summary.html#gif_pl
ugin_notes>

a) 100+ votes against the inclusion of GIF support
for 'bloating of the API' (shrugs vaguely), or..
b) a legal/licensing challenge from Unisys.

I doubt either of those things will come to pass.

[ Thanks for proving me wrong (see my other,
earlier reply). You made my day. :-) ]

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Andrew Thompson - 31 Oct 2005 03:54 GMT

> Unfortunately, the good folks at Sun don't appear to have provided a GIF
> writer for ImageIO, despite the lapse of the copyright.

I doubt they will be rushing in with one.

<http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/e0bf015d46c68c50>

[ Still waiting on any communication from Unisys.. ]

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Roedy Green - 31 Oct 2005 04:04 GMT

>There is no copyright issue unique to GIFs.

So the motive for no GIF writer is then a desire to push people to the
richer PNG format with variable alpha.

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Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

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