Alternative to Animated gif

[Adrien Lapointe]

Anybody could suggest an alternative to animated gif? I looked into animated png, but it seems to be only supported by a few browsers.

[Bear Bibeault]

For what purpose? A web page? If so, there's really no alternative besides a real video.

[Adrien Lapointe]

right now at the top of permies we have 2 small animated gif. The quality is kind of bad and we would like to have something better.

[Bear Bibeault]

I think you're pretty much stuck with animated gifs; video doesn't really serve the same purpose (and has browser version issues as well).

Maybe you just need better-quality animations rather than a different format?

[Martin Vashko]

There are two shortcomings of GIF: it can only store 8 bits per pixel, and it cannot be transparent. There isn't any cure for the second one, but the first one can be sometimes improved by using a good dithering algorithm (ie. save it with an app which has a good dithering algorithm).

Are you speaking about the two film strips at the top? The problem probably is that the displayed photos have way different colors, which makes choosing a good-fitting palette of 256 colors problematic. It might be better if you didn't use blending for switching the images, as this creates yet more colors to be encoded.

Given that the GIFs are otherwise pretty static, couldn't the images be just switched by some javascript? If you insist on the blending, this wouldn't work, obviously.

[Adrien Lapointe]

I didn't think Jforum would allow the javascript in the announcement. I thought it would only take html.

I am surprised that no other image format for animation has replaced gif. I guess the need was not really there as most people use flash and the like.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Adrien Lapointe wrote:I didn't think Jforum would allow the javascript in the announcement. I thought it would only take html.

That is correct. You could submit an enhancement request to change that of course.

[Steve Luke]

Isn't there an animation-friendly implementation of SVG? I know nothing about browser support but it might be worth investigating...

[Ulf Dittmer]

I'm not familiar with the applications you would use to create animations, but if it's destined for the web, maybe some of them can export JavaScript that draws on a Canvas? Or which uses a JavaScript animation library, of which there must be many out there by now.