Why use animated PNG instead of GIF?

The Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG) file format is an extension to the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) specification. It allows for animated PNG files that work similarly to animated GIF files, while supporting 24-bit images and 8-bit transparency not available for GIFs. It also retains backward compatibility with non-animated PNG files.

The APNG specification was created in 2004 by Stuart Parmenter and Vladimir Vukicevic of the Mozilla Corporation. APNG support was added to the ubiquitous libpng by a Seneca College student during the Google Summer of Code in 2006. Mozilla Firefox added support for APNG in Firefox 3 trunk builds on March 23, 2007. Iceweasel 3 does not support APNG.

Application support

KSquirrel as of version 0.7.2 (October 3, 2007)
XnView as of version 1.92 (December 19, 2007)
Opera as of version 9.5 (September 17, 2008)
Mozilla Firefox as of version 3 (June 17, 2008)
Gamani GIF Movie Gear as of version 4.2 (March 2008)
ImageJ as of version 1.41g (July 3, 2008)
Imagine as of version 1.0.4 (November 14, 2008)

(Source: APNG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The main reasons to use animated PNG (APNG)

 Animated PNGGIF
Non-patented compression methodDEFLATEOK !!!LZWnot ok
Color managementTruecolorOK !!!Palette based (maximum 256 colors)not ok
Transparency8 or 16 bitOK !!!1 bitnot ok

Graphic examples

Animated PNG (APNG)GIF
Example - transparency & color managementExample - transparency & color management
Example - transparency & color managementExample - transparency & color management
Example - transparency & color managementExample - transparency & color management


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