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The article doesn't really explain why the GIFs appear spotty, as far as I understand it. The first frame in an animated GIF surely has to be complete; after al
by joosters 14y ago
The article doesn't really explain why the GIFs appear spotty, as far as I understand it. The first frame in an animated GIF surely has to be complete; after all there's no previous frame to partially update. Then, a GIF viewer that didn't handle animation would show the first frame only - which wouldn't have any odd pixels and gaps in it.
- Smerity 14y agoGood point, I guess I didn't add an explicit explanation, instead building up to it implicitly. I've fixed that now. Thanks for the feedback. ---- When the GIF software decides to take a snapshot of the animation instead of playing it, it grabs an individual frame from somewhere past the start (i.e. movie trailers always start with a "boring" black frame). This would generally be fine except that, as we've seen, GIFs use partial frames to aid in compression. What we end up with is a partial frame that appears "spotty" as it only contains the difference between the past frame and the current one.
- joosters 14y agoThen the problem lies with programs that do understand animated GIFs, and not those that don't! If the GIF software can navigate multiple frames, then it must know how to render them. Its only lazy programs that would export these incomplete frames by just copying the bitstream. A properly written program would export a full frame, made from the composites of the previous parts of the animation. The programs that are viewing these single frame exports are rendering them just fine, they were simply supplied with poor data.