The GIF Format is Finally Patent-Free 369
tonymercmobily writes "Not many people noticed that the GIF file format is only now free from patents, as of the 1st of October 2006. Quick recap: first in 1999 Unisys tried to extort money from users and developers. Then, in 2003 the world hoped that the saga would finally be over. Then, in 2004, it was IBM's turn. Now, the SAGA seems to be over for real! Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...?"
Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure a big supporter of PNG, but understand why GIF is still around.
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just in time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
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http://www.3-t.com/libmng/faq.html#id-1040 [3-t.com]
It's horribly annoying, I thought "screw it", and went with plain PNG.
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from the linked page:
So what they're saying is that you can create multiple loops and script t
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Yeah, I didn't say that very well, but I didn't contradict it either.
The point remains; a GIF animation can have an unlimited number of displayed frames, pulling from the same set of frames repeatedly. A MNG may be able to have more loops, but in the end, all of the source information must be in the file and it must b
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In my case, it's just as well because I have my own constraints, so I'd have to either ignore their high-level all-in-one code, or end up translating the in-memory
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Informative)
Not being a web developer, I'm not familiar with the features and benefits of MNGs, but if they're at all similar to animated GIFs, I hope Firefox's image.animation_mode=none setting will apply when visiting the web sites you design.
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Informative)
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Not true, they removed it due to the fact that they had nobody that could maintain the code.
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Ah, yes:
http://steelgryphon.com/blog/?p=14 [steelgryphon.com]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1952
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but while "RAW" is the best format for storing digicam originals it is next to useless for anything else. So anyone who edits images or ob
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Check out this mung! (Score:3, Funny)
"Dude, check out this mung!"
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Like spinning arrows marking paragraphs?
Howabout dancing pokemon?
Forum avatar images that flash, blink and jump?
Emoticons that wink and wave?
Really, is there any way that technology has enhanced your web experience for the better?
There are two metaphors here people are used to: Static reading mode, and TV mode. Combining the two is a no no. Do NOT animate portions of a reading metaphor (over-stimuli), and do NOT ask people to just read words via video (under-stimuli).
The same goes for sound. If people want to listen to something, OFFER it to them, and let them control the start and stop of it. Playing sounds unasked on a web page is just...trashy. Animations are no different.
HINT: Adblock is popular for a reason. Even IE6 allows one to stop GIFs from animating.
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just in time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm... don't know why it wants QuickTime...
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Roger Miller - Whistle Stop (Score:3, Informative)
The original music from Hampster Dance is a sample from "Whistle Stop" performed by Roger Miller, sped up 70% (as if a 45 RPM vinyl record were being played at 78 RPM). This song originally appeared as the theme song from Disney's animated feature film Robin Hood, and when Hampster Dance went commercial, it might have proven cheaper to cover the song (as Cuban Boys did with "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia") than to license Miller's recording.
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Dude. Inlined animated gifs are like the bestest thing ever [imageshack.us]! Pity that Slashdot doesn't allow inlining images...
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Really, is there any way that technology has enhanced your web experience for the better?
Yes, it has allowed me to view small animations with a limited number of frames and colors in my web browser with very little overhead.
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Animation is useful to draw the user's attention to something. It's frequently overused, but that doesn't mean it's a bad technology. I mean, there's probably more viewers of the O'Reilly Report than of the educational program of your choice but it doesn't make Television itself evil, just the news media :P
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It's the factor, and it's losing ratings like crazy ever since Keith Olberman decided to stand up for what he (we) beileve in.
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Yeah, I just saw 'im on that ol' MSNBC while in Vegas for business, and I was actually really impressed. I'd watch that show again if I could get TV where I live. I mean it's not like I agree with everything he said, but it was more than any other political pundit that's not on Comedy Central.
It's really amazing to me the quality of news that comes off comedy central. Just watched Musharraf on there, it was a pretty good interview I thought. And funny :) But CC is owned by Viacom, it's not like they're
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On the CG forums I visit people frequently show animated how-to's using animated
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_moves [wikipedia.org]
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/traffic/signa ls/vl-v.html [homepages.cwi.nl]
As is most often the case, it's not the format that's the problem, it's what people use it for:
http://www.citilink.com/~grizzly/anigifs/itchy.gif [citilink.com]
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Re:Just in time... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure a big supporter of PNG, but understand why GIF is still around.
You mention that they are limited to 256 colors, but I think the real strength is that they can be limited to as few as two colors (or one and a transparency.) You can get crisp effects where they are needed (like black and white line art, or text) much better than the JPEG (which will do its best to bleed, in an effort to make the image look more like a photograph.)
It's also far more compact-- which is less of a concern for the end user now that dial-up modems are the exception rather than the rule, but can be a boon for a site concerned with bandwidth. And for simple animation it's far easier to create than a flash banner.
I prefer PNG myself-- but it's amazing how many users still have browsers that don't support it. Hell, it's amazing how many users don't have browsers that support flash for that matter. GIFs will always have a place with those who know the strength of the format.
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Maybe your graphics program only writes badly-compressed PNGs? There's a program called pngcrush which will losslessly optimize PNGs written by crap software.
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
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I'd only count the lack of animation as a cause. Microsoft hasn't done anything to hamper PNG as a GIF replacement. IE has been able to read indexed PNGs (<=256 colors) with binary transparency for years. That's identical in capabilities to a static GIF.
For a GIF-equivalent PNG, you have to go all the way b
...but it's not obsolete. (Score:2)
Evidence? (Score:4, Informative)
Evidence? Except for 1x1 images and the like, you're wrong. And you shouldnt' be using 1x1 images anyhow so...
Before sending any examples, make sure you're comparing same-depth images and have used pngout [advsys.net].
I once, as a demonstration, took a review off HardOCP and converted/recompressed all their GIFs into PNG, and saved several hundreds of kilobytes.
Still webmasters continue to use GIF because of ignorance.
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Re:Evidence? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it might be partially due to ignorance. I think many people don't know that there are different bit-depths for PNG, which (obviously) result in files of different sizes. I mean, there are other optimizations as well, but my point is that many web developers don't realize that you can make PNGs smaller.
But also there are support issues. PNG wasn't supported [well] in old browsers, and many web developers don't like to drop support for those browsers until it's necessary. Since little is lost by using GIF, they use GIF.
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but really.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hilarious? USPTO is Hilarious (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
Happy October 1st (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Happy October 1st (Score:5, Funny)
*For large values of 'now'
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Eh, it's Friday. I'm not thinking too hard. That's the best I could come up with.
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Because he's the President of the United States of America. Ridicule comes with the office. Eight years ago, you couldn't escape jokes about stained dresses. Sixteen years ago, every GHWB reference ended with "Wouldn't be prudent. Not at this juncture." It's a time-honoured tradition.
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What?? (Score:3, Funny)
well (Score:5, Insightful)
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reading comprehension (Score:2)
I'm not saying it wouldn't have ever happened. I'm saying we wouldn't have it TODAY.
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no. (Score:5, Funny)
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The gzip compression likely ain't enough.
The bzip2 compression, might work. Getting IBM's permission to add arithmetic coding (like bzip version 1) would help more.
Adding bzip2 (or bzip) to PNG would be nice.
No one in the know uses
Re:no. (Score:4, Informative)
Not entirely true. gzip is substantially faster and less processor intensive than bzip2, and is still commonly used where speed is as important as size. gzip is also more suitable for compressing streams than bzip2, which operates on large blocks, if I remember correctly. For those reasons, gzip is still heavily if not exclusively used for on the wire compresson, for example in transparent compression of http pages or cvs downloads.
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Patents, the world, and Certicom (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, like most on here, I will relish the day that the LZW patent expires. But look at how long that took to expire. Every day someone patents yet another obvious invention and it holds everybody back.
Take the Certicom 'Patents' on Eliptic Curve cryptography (ECC). Certicom act as if they own ECC - the write it on practically everything [certicom.com] they publish.
Yet on close analysis their patents give them almost no real control of ECC. The long and short of it that anything that operates on GF(p) is not covered.
The consequences of this is that NOBODY is using ECC, despite the fact that it's faster and has shorter keys. The whole field is held back for 20 years and nobody can make any progress.
It's not even used in Europe where these patents don't exist. Let me repeat this: The fact that some jerk of a company says it's theirs means the *whole* world doesn't use me.
I really wonder what goes through the minds of these poeple. Nobody wants to pay a fucktard like Certicom (tm) for a license for their mathematics. Nobody in the history of cryptography has made any serious amount of money from selling a security scheme. Why bother?
Simon
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The worst thing, in my mind, is the fact that some of these things are ambiguous, and there's a lot of misinformation out there. Take MP3, for example: I've heard from lots of people that you need to buy a license to use MP3, or you'll get sued. A little research, and it seems that there are lots of people who own patents related to MP3, and one of these companies which holds one of these patents has said that they want to get paid. Now, as far as I can tell, (and IANAL), this only applies to people who
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Are you a cryptographer or a mathematician? Patents don't need to be obvious to everyone for them to be obvious. They only need to be obvious to an expert in that field.
If 1000 different electrical engineers come up with idea X at the same time, that idea shouldn't be patentable even if the idea is utterly non-obvious to non-engineers.
GIF Patent Retrospect (Score:3, Insightful)
GIF Transparency (Score:2)
Is the flagship submarine patent really worth the money Unisys sank into it? Worth the money the US government spent protecting it? Worth it to "the progress of science and useful arts" [findlaw.com]?
Thank god and the patent office (Score:5, Funny)
If you haven't noticed.... (Score:2)
But I do find that saving images in gif using gimp creates larger size image compared to saving the same image using say photoshop. I have sometimes wondered why this happens
Wonders of the GIF. (Score:2, Informative)
In addition to flashing banner ads and stylish web sites [homestarrunner.com], the Graphical Interchange Format has brough us another important wonder.
Your The Man Now, Dog [ytmnd.com].
Imagine if we never had such a format. Would YTMND even be possible? We can only speculate, but I, for one, would like to thank Unisys for this valuable contribution. Afterall, 361,984—and growing—YTMND sites can't be wrong!
I guess this is ok... (Score:2)
But it's too bad there isn't more excitement about more modern (and more functional) formats like SVG.
What about TIFF? (Score:2)
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The only thing I know that might kill the format is the fact that it's limited to 256 colors.
Re:killed the format (Score:4, Informative)
so, with a free alternative, why use GIF up to now?
I also did a quick search of common file types on Google*
GIF 519,000,000
JPG 777,000,000
JPEG 111,000,000
BMP 44,700,000
PNG 111,000,000
So GIF is not all _that_ dead. * = Results could mean anything really - PNG could be Paupua New Gunnea, and BMP could be best manufacturing practices.
Two reasons left (Score:3, Insightful)
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Professional web designers should use the best tool for the job, not what's hip and trendy.
=Smidge=
Re:killed the format (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing it's used for these days is cheesy animated banner ads, but that's quickly being replaced with flash and java stuff.
First, that's just not true. Go to major web sites, look at the source, and search for ".gif". They're all over the fricken place. And who in their right mind would use Java for a bannar ad? I haven't noticed this, but the idea is completely retarded. Flash--- well Flash has its own problems. You need an expensive program to make them, and a special plug-in to view them. They can be better for certain purposes, especially if you want your ad to be interactive somehow, but if you just want to make a slideshow of completely different images, you're not going to beat animated GIFs for ease, or even size.
Professional Web developers, if they're any good, will use the proper tools for the job, and try to maximize compatibility as much as possible across different browsers. Use of plain HTML, CSS, JPEGs, and GIFs should be used the their maximum capability before looking to Javascript, and certainly before Java or Flash.
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Run-length-encoding is just plain better for images with areas of solid color, like cartoons. JPEG-type compression sucks for images with areas of solid colors and hard transitions. Sure, I could find some variant of PNG that would work, but could I be sure that it would work on every browser? The great part about GIF is that I know it will appear, and I don't have to worry that some browser out there might not impliment the pallette-b
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Re:killed the format (Score:5, Insightful)
JPEG isn't a replacement for GIF. 8-bit PNG serves pretty well as a replacement under many circumstances, but it's not supported as ubiquitously, nor does it support animation. Java and Javascript have nothing to do with it, and flash is fine for some animations, but it's certainly no less encumbered by IP restrictions than GIF.
Let's say you have a 4 color raster logo. Are you going to make a JPEG? That'd be dumb. Let's say you have that same logo, and you want to animate it for 3 frames. What's a better solution than animated GIF?
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Good. There's few Web features I hate as much as moving, flashing things in a page of text. They draw the eye towards themselves, and make concentrating on text harder. The only ones who use them are ad banner makers and web "designers" who are too young to shave.
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That's just not true. I know everyone here is trying to sound cool by saying, "Animated GIFs are teh 5uXx0rs!!!11! You probably use MIDIs on all your pages!"
Yes, the technology has limited practical use, but that's not the same as no use whatsoever. Just like many other technologies in the early days, animated GIFs were overused in horrible designs. But does the existence of a "BLINK" tag mean that all HTML was bad?
Sometimes people use animated GIFs as actual content, and not part of some needless fla
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Everything runs fine with jpg, java, javascript, and flash.
Java and Javascript are not image formats. Flash is much broader, is a non-accessible resource hog, and is most commonly used for irritating ads (not unlike animated GIFs, I suppose).
That leaves JPEG, which is actually an image format, but a totally different one. GIF was designed, for logos: it is lossless, has a very limited color palette, and allows for some amount of transparency. JPEG was designed for photos: i
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Are you an skillfull troll, or an ignorant ass? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
The 'vendors' did pay licensing, until something better came along (png). Thanks to Unisys contracts* though, Microsoft never provided proper support for PNG.
* Ask yourself why Microsoft never had to pay gif licensing fees when everyone else did, and PNG alpha layer support stayed broken through 3 versions of Internet Explorer.
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Stolen? Try given away. (Score:4, Informative)
So... how can it be stolen... if it was given away?
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You've obviously never dealt with IP lawyers.
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Ogg? (Score:2)
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Besides, Vorbis handles a bunch of stuff MP3 doesn't, such as a large number of channels (MP3 handles Mono, Stereo, Joint Stereo; Vorbis handle