This post will provide a quick overview of libraries that may assist you with GIF file encoding, a crucial step in the creation of GIF-maker apps. Keep in mind that projects are always changing; some are deprecated, while others are created.
Why is GIF encoding so difficult?
Although the format is different, creating a GIF file from a series of photographs could seem to be the same as creating a video file. But it couldn’t be farther from the reality! Remember that the GIF format was created in 1987, which is more than 30 years ago, and it didn’t even enable animations at first. Because of this, it has several drawbacks that make encoding somewhat more difficult.
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The color scheme
The biggest problem is that up to 256 colors (including the translucent one if employed) may be included in a single GIF frame. There may be more than one frame in the snapshot that is visible at the specified time. This is due to the possibility that a frame is smaller than the whole canvas. Transparent pixels may also be present in a frame. A frame with more than 256 colors must be transformed in some way before it can be encoded. There are many approaches to that problem, some of which may be combined.
They’re both hesitating. It mixes multiple distinct hues to approximate intermediate colors. The image below provides an example. Keep in mind that a picture is made up of simply pixels that are entirely black and white. Dithering, however, creates the appearance of greyscale.
We may first go through every frame, determine which colors are used and how often (make histograms), and then generate the ideal palette or palettes if every frame can be recorded (either in memory or in a format like a video file). These histograms may be made in a few different ways. The palettegen filter in FFmpeg, for instance, allows three distinct statistic modes.
A global palette is used if each GIF frame does not have its own palette. We may have more colors in the whole file when we use different palettes. Multiple palettes, however, need more decoding time and storage space. It could or might not have significance, depending on the use, canvas size, and animation duration.
It should be noted that the GIF format does not offer translucency (alpha channel, which is a fine-grained transparency level), just transparency (alpha bit, which allows pixels to be entirely transparent or fully opaque). This implies that any translucent pixels in your source will show up in the output GIF file as either transparent or opaque.
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Take a look at these pictures:
The chronology
Every frame may have a delay of its own. It’s the duration of a frame’s presentation. Centiseconds are used to assess delay (1 unit = 0.01s). 100 frames per second sounds fantastic. However, the limitations were imposed since GIF decoding is often slower than video, which is frequently hardware accelerated. Higher values are intentionally created from the lowest values (shortest delays). Furthermore, after growing, the amount is often much larger than the minimum!
The improvements are important in this case since Android-powered devices, namely smartphones and tablets, often have less powerful hardware than concurrently used PCs. This indicates that, unlike native programs that aren’t hybrid or Flutter, GIF encoding in Android apps is often done natively (using C/C++ and JNI).
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Thankfully, developing GIF encoding for your app doesn’t always need you to descend to such a low level of abstraction. FFmpeg is one of the most widely used libraries for encoding images and videos. There is no official version of Android that is developer-friendly. There are some wrappers, however. As of this writing, Mobile FFmpeg is among the most widely used. When you just want to create a
GIF from an input source, something like this will most likely be sufficient.
Gifsicle could be of interest to you if you want to work with some additional GIF-specific aspects, such as disposal methods on individual frames or change the information of GIF files. Regretfully, it lacks both an official Android binding and a popular unofficial version. It must be compiled from the original source.
Conclusion
The procedure of encoding GIFs is not simple. Since GIF was not intended for use in contemporary animation, we must use quite complex methods to get acceptable results. Thankfully, we don’t have to start from begin with everything. Due of the topic’s widespread popularity, libraries are available for usage in at least the app’s lower-level components.
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