On Monday I posted a Mozilla Labs blog entry discussing the APNG Edit extension I was releasing.
Just for fun, I thought I’d convert my favorite Firefox Flicks video to the APNG format….
The compression algorithms in APNG and AGIF are not really suited for straight conversions from video; doing so tends to result in large files (this one has about 340 frames at 86×75, weighing in at 990KB). Similarly, some images are better suited to JPEG or SVG… One just needs to use the right tool for the job. Hmm, <video> tag, anyone? 🙂
I also made a full-resolution (but still cropped) 230×200 version, although it’s a wee bit large (pun intended). So I’ll just link to it.
The conversion itself was a fairly simple process… I basically used “mplayer -vo png wheee.mov” to convert the QuickTime video to a pile of PNG images, dragged them into my APNG Edit window, and let it chew through them.
Dolske's blog 
The effect is nice, and APNG works fine in the current builds.
Except for one thing: each frame is decoded into 32bits pixels (ARGB), and maintained in memory, so the ‘whee.png’ is about 4MB, but internal memory usage (see about:cache) is 28MB.
So, until this is handled differently one should not consider APNG as a video format.
However, if Firefox/Mozilla could learn to handle APNG/AGIF’s like video, only keeping a few frames in memory, both format will still have a great future.
Would be nice to get hold of the original video and try this then. APNG doesn’t get back what the low-quality MOV lost 😉 Still, very cool, although memory usage is something to think about.