6 ms·

APNG support lands in WebKit

70 points by maxst 12y ago

maxst 12y ago
Status: RESOLVED FIXED It's implemented on top of vanilla libpng. In practice, only WebKit-based browsers will get APNG, not Chromium-based ones. That's not a big market share. But WebKit and Blink engines are still pretty similar, so there's something to consider.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Vanilla libpng, not libapng? Interesting. Apparently they've built an APNG decoder.
- masklinn 12y ago
  > In practice, only WebKit-based browsers will get APNG, not Chromium-based ones. That's not a big market share. Safari Mobile is a pretty big marketshare, if that ever trickles down to it.
  - maxst 12y ago
    Safari uses WebKit, except for WebKit image decoders. The good news is, Apple implemented APNG support on their own: http://caniuse.com/apng http://caniuse.com/apng So at this point there are 2 open source implementation, plus 1 closed source.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Two down (Gecko, WebKit), two to go (Trident, Blink). I'd love to see more browsers have APNG. Alpha transparency in animation is awesome. It's not a lossy format like WebP, but PNG offers more sophisticated lossless compression than GIF (after all, it was supposed to be a better GIF, basically), so I wonder if APNG could produce more efficient compression for video with a good encoder.
- creshal 12y ago
  > so I wonder if APNG could produce more efficient compression for video with a good encoder. It's hard to not be more efficient than GIF.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    True, but GIF is only super-inefficient because it's used for video despite not being designed for it, I think.
    - creshal 12y ago
      That's one problem, and APNG won't solve it, because both use lossless compression not ideal for videos. Apart from that, GIF is almost 30 years old. Compression standards improved a lot since.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        Oh, of course APNG won't solve it for the same reason. But it could still offer (perhaps marginally) better compression.
    - jahewson 12y ago
      The big difference is that GIF uses LZW compression which is less efficient than DEFLATE (i.e. ZLIB) which is used in PNG.
- leni536 12y ago
  > It's not a lossy format like WebP WebP can hold both lossless and lossy animations. AFAIK it can even have mixed lossless and lossy frames in the same animation.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Oh yes, I'm aware that it also supports lossless. I mentioned lossy because that's what matters for the case of video specifically.
cogburnd02 12y ago
I can't wait for APNG support to become standard. Most of the GIF animations on Wikimedia Commons seem like they'd be more efficiently encoded as PNGs; I wonder what the size comparison (GIF vs. APNG) is like for some of the images on there? e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Color_coded_racetrack_large_channel.gif http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Color_coded_racetrack...
- witty_username 12y ago
  Many would be even more efficiently encoded in <choose your favorite video format here>, I guess.
MLR 12y ago
Would've been great to see this happen five years, seems like it's largely irrelevant now with the prevalence of HTML5 video compression for short clips.
- coob 12y ago
  For photorealistic video yes, but APNG is much more suited than anything else for animated graphics where SVG isn't a good fit.
  - espadrine 12y ago
    Do you have examples where APNG wins compression-wise relative to H.264?
    - maxst 12y ago
      JPEG usually wins over PNG compression-wise, but in some use cases it makes sense to use PNG. The same thing with animation/video.
    - coob 12y ago
      Suited in terms of desired quality, not necessarily file size. Sometimes you need pixel perfect frames, not 4:2:2 b-frame messiness.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    If nothing else, this lets you make loading spinners with proper alpha-blended antialiased edges (so you don't need "dark background" and "light background" versions).
    - duskwuff 12y ago
      Indeed, as far as I know, most video formats currently playable in browsers don't support transparency at all.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Eric_WVGG 12y ago
Oh goodness. With retina displays becoming commonplace, the need for a modernized lossy + alpha standard like JPEG2000, JPEG XR or even WebP is stronger than ever. I can't believe they're wasting resources on… better meme cartoons…
mmastrac 12y ago
APNG is a funny, political beast. It basically evolved after Mozilla decided to nuke MNG support to make Firefox slimmer and then needed to re-invent a transparency-capable animation format for browser "throbbers". There were calls to replace libpng with libmng which purported to support both PNG and MNG at the same binary size, but those never panned out. IIRC, individuals in the PNG group took the whole thing as a slight and then refused to incorporate it into the official spec, leaving it as a bit of an orphan. The Chrome guys never bothered implementing it and quietly worked on WebP. I suspect that part of the reason APNG never received widespread adoption was bad blood from MNG never getting proper attention. While MNG was kind of a crappy spec in retrospect, it was still way better than an animated GIF. Unfortunately JNG was also a casualty in this whole war -- a format that could have been both lossless and supported proper alpha transparency. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574
- gpvos 12y ago
  As far as I remember, the main difference in point of view was that the PNG guys (rightly so, IMO) saw animations as something different from a still image, and wanted to keep that distinction, also in the face of MIME types, file headers, file name extensions, etc., while lots of other (misguided) people wanted animation as a feature in an image format, because they were used to that from GIF. There may have been some bad blood from MNG, but that was not the main point as far as I understand. Although I must say that the links you provide are interesting reading.
  - mmastrac 12y ago
    Here's the vote where the PNG group rejected APNG: https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=3.0.6.32.20070420132821.012dd8e8%40mail.comcast.net https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforg... And Vlad's message after the vote: http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.html http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.ht...
ChrisGranger 12y ago
What are people using to create APNG animations? I have an older version of Photoshop but it doesn't seem to support the format. I tried APNG Anime Maker, but it's really rudimentary and doesn't optimize the image at all the way ImageReady does with GIFs.
- maxst 12y ago
  Try this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/
- delian66 12y ago
  RealWorld Paint can export to APNG and has nice animation support: http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor
billyhoffman 12y ago
Animated GIF's can be lossless optimized with GIFsicle. I went looking for something similar for APNG and found apngopt. http://sourceforge.net/projects/apng/files/APNG_Optimizer/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/apng/files/APNG_Optimizer/ Think of it as pngcrush for each animation frame. Also, it can leverage Google's Zopfli implementation of DEFLATE, which produces much smaller output than zlib's implementation. I haven't seen any other lossless optimization tools using Zopfli, so that's pretty cool. (update: actually it looks like recent versions of advpng can use Zopfli) Also, some good comparisons of APNG vs. GIF vs. WebP animations are here: http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html
greggman 12y ago
As APNG any good? My uninformed impression is it's kind of crap. Wishing they'd all support BPG instead http://bellard.org/bpg/ http://bellard.org/bpg/
- TD-Linux 12y ago
  Unfortunately, BPG is heavily patent encumbered so no one can risk shipping it right now.

70 points by maxst 12y ago

maxst 12y ago

Status: RESOLVED FIXED It's implemented on top of vanilla libpng. In practice, only WebKit-based browsers will get APNG, not Chromium-based ones. That's not a big market share. But WebKit and Blink engines are still pretty similar, so there's something to consider.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Vanilla libpng, not libapng? Interesting. Apparently they've built an APNG decoder.
masklinn 12y ago
> In practice, only WebKit-based browsers will get APNG, not Chromium-based ones. That's not a big market share. Safari Mobile is a pretty big marketshare, if that ever trickles down to it.
- maxst 12y ago
  Safari uses WebKit, except for WebKit image decoders. The good news is, Apple implemented APNG support on their own: http://caniuse.com/apng http://caniuse.com/apng So at this point there are 2 open source implementation, plus 1 closed source.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

Two down (Gecko, WebKit), two to go (Trident, Blink). I'd love to see more browsers have APNG. Alpha transparency in animation is awesome. It's not a lossy format like WebP, but PNG offers more sophisticated lossless compression than GIF (after all, it was supposed to be a better GIF, basically), so I wonder if APNG could produce more efficient compression for video with a good encoder.

creshal 12y ago
> so I wonder if APNG could produce more efficient compression for video with a good encoder. It's hard to not be more efficient than GIF.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  True, but GIF is only super-inefficient because it's used for video despite not being designed for it, I think.
  - creshal 12y ago
    That's one problem, and APNG won't solve it, because both use lossless compression not ideal for videos. Apart from that, GIF is almost 30 years old. Compression standards improved a lot since.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      Oh, of course APNG won't solve it for the same reason. But it could still offer (perhaps marginally) better compression.
  - jahewson 12y ago
    The big difference is that GIF uses LZW compression which is less efficient than DEFLATE (i.e. ZLIB) which is used in PNG.
leni536 12y ago
> It's not a lossy format like WebP WebP can hold both lossless and lossy animations. AFAIK it can even have mixed lossless and lossy frames in the same animation.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Oh yes, I'm aware that it also supports lossless. I mentioned lossy because that's what matters for the case of video specifically.

cogburnd02 12y ago

I can't wait for APNG support to become standard. Most of the GIF animations on Wikimedia Commons seem like they'd be more efficiently encoded as PNGs; I wonder what the size comparison (GIF vs. APNG) is like for some of the images on there? e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Color_coded_racetrack_large_channel.gif http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Color_coded_racetrack...

witty_username 12y ago
Many would be even more efficiently encoded in <choose your favorite video format here>, I guess.

MLR 12y ago

Would've been great to see this happen five years, seems like it's largely irrelevant now with the prevalence of HTML5 video compression for short clips.

coob 12y ago
For photorealistic video yes, but APNG is much more suited than anything else for animated graphics where SVG isn't a good fit.
- espadrine 12y ago
  Do you have examples where APNG wins compression-wise relative to H.264?
  - maxst 12y ago
    JPEG usually wins over PNG compression-wise, but in some use cases it makes sense to use PNG. The same thing with animation/video.
  - coob 12y ago
    Suited in terms of desired quality, not necessarily file size. Sometimes you need pixel perfect frames, not 4:2:2 b-frame messiness.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  If nothing else, this lets you make loading spinners with proper alpha-blended antialiased edges (so you don't need "dark background" and "light background" versions).
  - duskwuff 12y ago
    Indeed, as far as I know, most video formats currently playable in browsers don't support transparency at all.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

Eric_WVGG 12y ago

Oh goodness. With retina displays becoming commonplace, the need for a modernized lossy + alpha standard like JPEG2000, JPEG XR or even WebP is stronger than ever. I can't believe they're wasting resources on… better meme cartoons…

mmastrac 12y ago

APNG is a funny, political beast. It basically evolved after Mozilla decided to nuke MNG support to make Firefox slimmer and then needed to re-invent a transparency-capable animation format for browser "throbbers". There were calls to replace libpng with libmng which purported to support both PNG and MNG at the same binary size, but those never panned out. IIRC, individuals in the PNG group took the whole thing as a slight and then refused to incorporate it into the official spec, leaving it as a bit of an orphan. The Chrome guys never bothered implementing it and quietly worked on WebP. I suspect that part of the reason APNG never received widespread adoption was bad blood from MNG never getting proper attention. While MNG was kind of a crappy spec in retrospect, it was still way better than an animated GIF. Unfortunately JNG was also a casualty in this whole war -- a format that could have been both lossless and supported proper alpha transparency. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574

gpvos 12y ago
As far as I remember, the main difference in point of view was that the PNG guys (rightly so, IMO) saw animations as something different from a still image, and wanted to keep that distinction, also in the face of MIME types, file headers, file name extensions, etc., while lots of other (misguided) people wanted animation as a feature in an image format, because they were used to that from GIF. There may have been some bad blood from MNG, but that was not the main point as far as I understand. Although I must say that the links you provide are interesting reading.
- mmastrac 12y ago
  Here's the vote where the PNG group rejected APNG: https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=3.0.6.32.20070420132821.012dd8e8%40mail.comcast.net https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforg... And Vlad's message after the vote: http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.html http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.ht...

ChrisGranger 12y ago

What are people using to create APNG animations? I have an older version of Photoshop but it doesn't seem to support the format. I tried APNG Anime Maker, but it's really rudimentary and doesn't optimize the image at all the way ImageReady does with GIFs.

maxst 12y ago
Try this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/
delian66 12y ago
RealWorld Paint can export to APNG and has nice animation support: http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor

billyhoffman 12y ago

Animated GIF's can be lossless optimized with GIFsicle. I went looking for something similar for APNG and found apngopt. http://sourceforge.net/projects/apng/files/APNG_Optimizer/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/apng/files/APNG_Optimizer/ Think of it as pngcrush for each animation frame. Also, it can leverage Google's Zopfli implementation of DEFLATE, which produces much smaller output than zlib's implementation. I haven't seen any other lossless optimization tools using Zopfli, so that's pretty cool. (update: actually it looks like recent versions of advpng can use Zopfli) Also, some good comparisons of APNG vs. GIF vs. WebP animations are here: http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html

greggman 12y ago

As APNG any good? My uninformed impression is it's kind of crap. Wishing they'd all support BPG instead http://bellard.org/bpg/ http://bellard.org/bpg/

TD-Linux 12y ago
Unfortunately, BPG is heavily patent encumbered so no one can risk shipping it right now.