Animating with GD?

[Simon Fredriksson]

Is it possible to create GIF animations using GD?

//Simon

[Edward Rudd]

Not anymore due to the Unisys LZW patent issues.. GD has no support for
GIF file anymore.
Wait until next june.. Then you can create animated GIF files with GD
(Unisys' patent expires).

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 21:35:43 +0200, Simon Fredriksson wrote:

> Is it possible to create GIF animations using GD?
>
> //Simon

[Ashley M. Kirchner]

Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:

> That patent already expired for the US (June 30, 2003). Canadian
> patent expires July 7, 2004, the counterpart patents in the United
> Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expire June 18, 2004, and the
> Japanese counterpart patents expire June 20, 2004.

I forgot to quote the link on Unisys' site:

[url]http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/[/url]

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[Jaakko hyvätti]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Simon Fredriksson wrote:

> Is it possible to create GIF animations using GD?

Yes, with patches from: [url]http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/sw/[/url] .

-Jaakko


Animated GIF output for PHP

php-4.3.2-gifanim.diff - patch to php-4.3.2 and php-4.3.3RC1 to
implement LZW compressed GIF images and GIF89a animations. Can be used
when LZW properly licensed from Unisys or where otherwise legal. For
most of the world, the Unisys patent is not valid and for example in
the US the patent expired June 20th 2003. The configuration part of
the patch might not be as beautiful as it could, I hope someone of the
developer could help here. I hope this gets included in future
releases of PHP.

The patch essentially copies gd_lzw_out.c file from gd1.5.tar.gz to
php-4.3.2/ext/gd/libgd/ with minor modifications, and patches other
places in php source to include compilation of this file. This patch
is based on patches from [url]http://www.rime.com.au/gd/[/url].

The animation part of this patch implements three new functions,
imagegifanimbegin(), imagegifanimadd(), and imagegifanimend(). With
these functions, animated gif images can be created on the fly with
php. The documentation for the functions is included in
php-doc-anim.diff. Note that the animations are not optimized, as they
are written frame by frame to output or files. This is just a fast
non-cpu-intensive way of creating animations on the fly. You need to
process the resulting file with for example gifsicle if you need
optimized files: [url]http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/[/url] .

I am in no way promoting GIF format over such superior formats as PNG,
MNG or JPEG, but for some todays applications GIF format still has its
uses. For example PNG and MNG are not supported in any 3G mobile
terminals and GIF89A is the only way to create animations for visually
attractive content. Even Mozilla project does not include MNG support
for their code by default, so GIF89A is the only option.

Note! If you are using mod_perl also with Apache, you must not use the
included libgd in php distribution, but you have to configure with
external php library, the same one perl GD module uses. Otherwise you
will get segmentation faults.

Animated gif output for GD-2

gd-2.0.15-gifanim.diff - a patch to GD-2.0.15 to make it read and
write gif files and write animated gif files. Ported from PHP changes
above. There is no manual, just try to read gd.h.

The patch essentially copies files gd_gif_in.c and gd_lzw_out.c from
gd1.5.tar.gz with minor modifications to bring the interface up to
gd-2 level, and patches gd.h for prototypes and makefile to include
compilation of this file. This is based on pathces from
[url]http://www.rime.com.au/gd/[/url].

Animated gif output for perl GD module

GD-2.07-gifanim.diff - a patch to perl module that implements the perl
interface to the above patched gd-2.0.15. Even documentation is
included this time!


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