This thread is moved from a GIF animation program: LICEcap

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.

Solution

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.

Compatibility

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

Further work

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.

Related articles on the topic

* Converting Videos to GIF - FreewareGenius
* http://www.instantfundas.com/2009/07/4- ... d-png.html
* http://matthewammann.com/2009/08/16/how ... mated-png/

Related tools:

* 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.

NOTE: A few more tests with some LICEcap files converted to APNG with its extras like text and mouse click animation unfortunately had some issues (conversion looks very odd). Looking into that.

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Interesting summary, thank you.

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Update: I tested gif2apng with GIFs created using PhotoScape's animation tool and it works beautifully. Consistently getting 50% of the size with no visible difference from the original. Excellent results especially when you have MANY frames of a HOWTO or slideshow.

Example:

Scrambled Egg animated GIF (105 k) converted to APNG (50.9 k)

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Thread update: user procyon solved this problem.

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Some other stuff to create and edit animated PNG's:
APNG Anime maker - http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2367
RealWorld Paint - http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2166
Java APNG - https://www.reto-hoehener.ch/japng/
Paint.NET plugin - http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/t ... agif-apng/
Firefox addon - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/animat/

Also recently, while reporting a gif display bug for the image viewer Imagine, I requested support for creating animated png's. The animation editor can read and convert apng's to other formats like gif and animated cursors but can't create apng itself. Hopefully future versions will have that feature.

Great news. Hopefully the wide toolset to generate animated files that are dramatically superior to GIF will expand it's adoption.

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One of the things that's prevented me from working with the APNG format (or really any animation format) is lack of an effective editor. I hadn't worked with RWPaint much but finally started working with it a bit more and found it to be an outstanding animation editor (for both GIF and PNG).

Lots of tools and tweaks including reordering, copy/paste, edition, and batch changes for color, size, animation speed, etc. PhotoScape has only reording, resizing, and only the GIF format. This is a great find.

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