[Hedda]

I've added giflib to xbmc, currently only textures, e.g., backgrounds work: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/4474

So this will add initial support for animated images as skin backdrops and for GUI textures in skins, very cool indeed! Thank you!


Animated GIFs first then support APNG (Animated PNG) and/or MJPEG (Motion JPEG) next once GIF accepted and merged into mainline?


The new library version of apngasm should be a good choice for APNG https://github.com/apngasm/apngasm

That would help support the APNG standalization goal for the apngasm project https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374...standardi/

Animated PNG could have been a standard more than 10 years ago and yet we're stuck with GIF. We'll make new OSS tools to use it now!

Animated PNG, a high quality animated image format complete with full alpha channel and graceful degradation has been available and usable since 2004. Essentially APNG is like a much better Animated GIF. A large problem hindering widespread use is the lack of tools to create APNG. We would like to remedy this by taking the leading APNG conversion tool apngasm and, along with its author Max turn it into a robust and feature packed conversion library and a provide a full graphical authoring and editing tool.

Some Examples:

Mozilla has a good set of demos here: https://people.mozilla.com/~dolske/apng/demo.html

There is a very good comparison of APNG to GIF here: http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_vs_apng.html

The Phantom Open Emoji project is using APNG for animated emoji: https://github.com/Genshin/PhantomOpenEmoji

We'd love to show you APNG samples right here on kickstarter, but kickstarter alters embedded images which disables the animation. Hopefully this campaign will provide the tools and recognition for APNG that will help kickstarter and others properly support it.

Existing Support:

APNG support is already built into a variety of browsers. FireFox and Opera support it natively and support can be added to Chrome with the APNG extension. There is also a patch submitted to Chrome to add APNG support and it will be accepted and integrated into Chrome core if the Google team sees there are enough people using APNG on the web. A few more APNG supporting software packages can be found here: http://littlesvr.ca/apng/

Currently the only real/robust tool to author APNG is the standalone command line "APNG Assembler" tool apngasm by Max Stepin. It is not available as a library and is ready for a big set of refinements and improvements. We believe if we make a new and improved version of apngasm we can help adoption and acceptance and quickly replace Animated GIF as the dominant web animated image format. So we've paired up with Max to [re]make the tools.

MJPEG (Motion JPEG or M-JPEG) and MJ2 (Motion JPEG 2000) is basically Animated JPEG / JPEG 2000, so it uses individually compressed JPG images in animation series instead of GIF or PNG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000#Motion_JPEG_2000

For libraries checkout mjpegtools and OpenJPEG
http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net
http://www.openjpeg.org

Signed / More wants more!