5 ms·

What ever happened to the APNG format? I remember dabbling with it years ago but seems to have never caught on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG https://en.w

What ever happened to the APNG format? I remember dabbling with it years ago but seems to have never caught on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

vortico 7y ago
All browsers except IE/Edge support it, so it "caught on", but I don't see it in the wild, so it hasn't caught on with web publishers.
kevingadd 7y ago
It was stonewalled by multiple browser vendors for a long time which helped eat away at its momentum. In that time period people tended to give up and just use webm/h264 instead (after all, those work almost everywhere, including old devices that don't have apng)
niftich 7y ago
Chrome didn't support it until 2017 [1], with the release of Chrome 59 [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13871809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13871809 [2] https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6691520493125632 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6691520493125632
Dylan16807 7y ago
It's fine, but it's lossless so it's not good for most video use cases.
- pjc50 7y ago
  So is animated gif, though.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    What I'm saying is, in uses akin to this article, apng is not a meaningful upgrade over gif. It's a huge upgrade for certain kinds of content, especially animated icons with aliased edges. But that narrowness means there's only a moderately small push toward adoption.
    - iainmerrick 7y ago
      In principle it has the same advantages PNG has over GIF for static images -- 24-bit color and 8-bit alpha, both of which are a big deal. APNG or something similar should have replaced GIF completely, but the delivery was badly fumbled. Browsers now mostly support it, but authoring tools mostly don’t.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        More color depth is sort of useful for heavily compressed video. Transparency very rarely matters in that use case.
        iainmerrick 7y ago
        “Sort of useful”?? 8-bit versus 24-bit color is like night and day! Transparency for video is kind of a niche thing, sure, but when you need it you really need it. A good example would be compositing green-screen footage. (Keying transparency on a specific color is exactly the kind of hack GIF uses, whereas PNG does it properly, with a separate alpha channel.) Omitting obvious stuff like an alpha channel because you don’t think anyone needs it is exactly the kind of oversight that makes all these “modern” video formats unable to completely replace GIFs. Looping is another example.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        For a super compressed video there's really not that much difference. And that's almost all videos as gifs. You don't want it to be 100MB. And I didn't say transparency isn't needed by "anyone". I said it's very rare for video-ish content. Apng is better than gif. But its advantages really shine in realms other than video content. They're both pretty bad at video content, even despite looping properly.

What ever happened to the APNG format? I remember dabbling with it years ago but seems to have never caught on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

vortico 7y ago

All browsers except IE/Edge support it, so it "caught on", but I don't see it in the wild, so it hasn't caught on with web publishers.

kevingadd 7y ago

It was stonewalled by multiple browser vendors for a long time which helped eat away at its momentum. In that time period people tended to give up and just use webm/h264 instead (after all, those work almost everywhere, including old devices that don't have apng)

niftich 7y ago

Chrome didn't support it until 2017 [1], with the release of Chrome 59 [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13871809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13871809 [2] https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6691520493125632 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6691520493125632

Dylan16807 7y ago

It's fine, but it's lossless so it's not good for most video use cases.

pjc50 7y ago
So is animated gif, though.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  What I'm saying is, in uses akin to this article, apng is not a meaningful upgrade over gif. It's a huge upgrade for certain kinds of content, especially animated icons with aliased edges. But that narrowness means there's only a moderately small push toward adoption.
  - iainmerrick 7y ago
    In principle it has the same advantages PNG has over GIF for static images -- 24-bit color and 8-bit alpha, both of which are a big deal. APNG or something similar should have replaced GIF completely, but the delivery was badly fumbled. Browsers now mostly support it, but authoring tools mostly don’t.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      More color depth is sort of useful for heavily compressed video. Transparency very rarely matters in that use case.
      - iainmerrick 7y ago
        “Sort of useful”?? 8-bit versus 24-bit color is like night and day! Transparency for video is kind of a niche thing, sure, but when you need it you really need it. A good example would be compositing green-screen footage. (Keying transparency on a specific color is exactly the kind of hack GIF uses, whereas PNG does it properly, with a separate alpha channel.) Omitting obvious stuff like an alpha channel because you don’t think anyone needs it is exactly the kind of oversight that makes all these “modern” video formats unable to completely replace GIFs. Looping is another example.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        For a super compressed video there's really not that much difference. And that's almost all videos as gifs. You don't want it to be 100MB. And I didn't say transparency isn't needed by "anyone". I said it's very rare for video-ish content. Apng is better than gif. But its advantages really shine in realms other than video content. They're both pretty bad at video content, even despite looping properly.