We now have support for APNG 0.8 in the tree thanks to the hard work and patience of Andrew Smith. APNG 1.0 should show up sometime in the next couple of weeks as we try to integrate recent comments in to the spec and work out some error cases in the spec. We’re going to have to make one large (but simple) spec change once we hear back from the PNG group in that we want the chunk names to be public (i.e. aCTl instead of acTl) as APNG is clearly designed to be used publicly.
Andrew has done both APNG read and write support as a patch to libpng so other applications can add support for APNGs with ease!
It is really great to see this finally coming to life. This is something that the web has been missing for quite some time.
March 20, 2007 at 6:40 pm
OMG, Finally!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
March 21, 2007 at 5:38 am
Nice work! I helped to create the current throbber animated gif that lives in Firefox today. It was carefully crafted to minimize the inherent weaknesses of the GIF format - we even give it a -moz-opacity to make it blend in a bit better.
I can’t wait to replace it with something with alpha transparency.
So, how do I create an APNG file? Anyone have a GIMP plugin on the way?
March 21, 2007 at 9:42 am
Well, looks like JNG will never see the light of day now. That’s a shame, I really couldn’t care less about animated images given what most people use them for. :/
March 21, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Steven:
The GIMP guys have expressed interest before and I sent them mail yesterday. Hope to have something from them soon. We’ll get a tool put up somewhere in the next few days (or you can look at http://littlesvr.ca/apng/ under the tutorials and built it all yourself).
ant:
JNG isn’t really related to MNG. Please put up an extension on addons to support JNG, HD Photo, JPEG2000 or whatever your favorite image format is!
March 24, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Can an addon provide support for the alpha blending in JNG though, like an internal module can?
Because when i tried the MNG plugin, it always rendered it on a white background (or another colour set).
March 25, 2007 at 4:06 pm
This is great! Any idea when (or even if) Opera and Webkit do plan to support APNG?
Once these drawing engines supoport APNG and are adopted widely it’s pretty safe to use. If it’s limited to Gecko powered applications it’s a nice-to-have, but nothing more.
March 29, 2007 at 12:13 am
Decryptor: There were 2 “mng plugins” — one was an actual NPAPI plugin which will have a hard time with transparency. The other was an xpcom component extension which works directly with the image library in the same way as all the internal ones and can fully support transparency.
xeen: No ETA yet. We want to see it supported in those very much and will be talking to the right people.
March 30, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Cool, i had only ever heard of the NPAPI one, but if there are hooks with xpcom then that’s a lot better.
I’d try my hand at writing one, if i wasn’t so bad at C (and who knows, maybe we will see a AJNG in the future)
March 13, 2008 at 1:29 am
This is great …… I love it
Resently downloaded Firefox 3 beta 4 and tested the support for APNG.
It is working great…….
The revolution for the public communities
April 8, 2008 at 1:03 pm
APNG! Great news! This is the evolution!
August 3, 2008 at 7:04 am
Well, it’s nice, but what tool are there?
No editor tool (APNG editor is only a creator and cannot actually edit an APNG file), no mng2apng converter so it’s pretty useless for now. A pity.
August 14, 2008 at 4:46 pm
We just started tests on apng for animated shields over planets/cities. We wanted to see if semitransparent animation looked ok.
Well, It works like a charm for Mozilla users! IE users only see the first frame which we did plan for.