Idea

Heya.

I have an idea, I'm currently too busy, but its something I want that will answer a lot of my website desires.

I want to write a PHP routine(s) to dynamically create animated gifs for my site. I should probably use GD as I have had a lot of success in my static images with it.

Thing is, I do not know how to create animated gifs anyway.

I'm after any advice on this from charitable gurus everywhere.

Thing is, the gifs would have to be optimized as good as the standard gif animations you get, so I guess I would have to write the whole thing. I think it would be a great technology.

Penny for your thoughts

i was thinking of doing this some time ago, but no luck..

see, gif has ben disabled by default in gd because of patent issues. fortunetly, a couple of months ago, this patent expired, and gif is back in gd.

maybe, they will now work on animated gifs in gd, but i don't think it is possible with gd now..


btw, checkout imagick -- image magick.. i think it can work with animated gifs...

good luck ;)

compuserves patent expired? Hurray! It was very lame of them to push the patent issue when their image format is so universal. I never really understood what they hoped to gain. I guess all image editor's like photoshop were supposed to be paying them royalties???

yap, it was a stupid thing. the royalities wherent that high, but it made opensource products that produce gif images impossible...

and that is how PNG (PNG is Not Gif) was created..

Yeah, I knew that's why PNG was created but Ididn't realize compuserves patent ws going to expire this soon. I searched for an older version of GD for a while about 18 months ago for something I wanted to try out when I got time but it has been somewhat taboo to offer the old versions with gif support. It's a good day for the web community.

Cool. But hey, anyone know what the next step is towards animated gif-ery (or Png-ery, or should that be Mng-ery.. sounds like something entirely different )?

I mean the next step from having say 5 gif/pngs you want to animate in sequence?

I've heard animated pngs (called mngs) aren't widely supported. Anyone know?

Here'a a list of browsers, etc. that support MNGs.

Apparently the current version of GD does not create Gif images, but older version have ImageGif(), and do.

But, Gif returns to GD circa 2004 by the looks of things.

http://www.boutell.com/gd/

I am going toask them about my GD animated Gif idea, if I get any response I'll let you know.