Background
- So I did some digging for an animated GIF alternative. The only thing I came up with that didn't involve a Javascript tool that probably wouldn't work here on the forums was APNG format, only supported by some browsers (Opera, Mozilla, and Chrome w/ a plugin).
So I looked into this a bit more to see if this was worthwhile.
- For GIF to APNG, there's a great converter GIF2APNG that works great. Its open source, looks portable (no settings saved), and works beautifully on LICEcap files. One of the animations created with LICEcap deflated to 60% of its original size. The original animation Baas posted on the LICEcap page reduced by 50%. In addition, the files further compressed with ZIP compression brought the size down even more. [Running ZIP or 7-zip on the GIF file made no real difference.]
Note that the program's results depended on the file type: it only decreases file size of simple GIF animations on the home site by about 15%. I was only able to save about 5% on an animated series of pictures I took.
- APNG support with some PFW programs:
- Yes: XnView 1.98.5, VirtualDub with mod, Opera - yes, but had some problems with more complex ones generated by LiceCAP
No: LibreOffice 3.44, IrfanView 4.27, FastStone Image Viewer 4.2, QTWeb, Maxthon
No and doesn't work with animated GIF files either: Universal Viewer 5.3.0 - (GIF files will view, but had some problems with more complex ones generated by LiceCAP), VLC, SMPLayer, ComicsViewer
- Yes: XnView 1.98.5, VirtualDub with mod, Opera - yes, but had some problems with more complex ones generated by LiceCAP
- As a direct conversion from animated GIF to APNG doesn't take advantage of PNG's powerful compression abilities, I went looking for a better method: I tried to split up the GIF files, optimize them with a batch operation in RIOT, and then reassemble.
I used IrfanView (Options - Extract all Frames), which is great, but there's an incompatibility with LICEcap: you can't use any of the program's extras (timer, mouse button press animation, added words, etc.) as the images show up in different sizes. Right now I'm working with a program to assemble all the frames back together again as an APNG file rather than going through GIF and then the converter. Might be able to bring the size down to something miniscule.
I also tried just converting a GIF to video using VirtualDub, which worked in VLC. I think I might have been able to bring the size down with a better compression algorithm.
- * Converting Videos to GIF - FreewareGenius
* http://www.instantfundas.com/2009/07/4- ... d-png.html
* http://matthewammann.com/2009/08/16/how ... mated-png/
- * There's a a Firefox plugin that allow some type of edition
* VirtualDub mod - https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdubapngmod/
* Assemble a series of TGA / PNG into an animation (command line): http://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/
* Another Java-based program for GIF to APNG conversion: http://sourceforge.net/projects/giftoapngconver/
Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions or alternatives, I'm certainly interested.