GSoC idea: Support for APNG in gdk-pixbuf and EOG -- looking for a mentor

[Piotr Jurkiewicz <piotr jerzy jurkiewicz gmail com>]

Hi,

I want to propose my own idea for GSoC 2015, namely introduction of 
support for Animated PNG in gdk-pixbuf and EOG. In order to do that I 
need to find a mentor, who will guide my project and specify required 
initial contribution to the module I am applying to work on.

APNG is a simple lossless animated image format, based on PNG. In 
comparison to GIF, it adds support for 24-bit images and 8-bit 
transparency, what makes it superior to that format. The same time APNG is:

- far more simple than its competitors, namely MNG and WebP
- require less code, memory and cpu time to decode (in particular in 
comparison to WebP, which is based on sophisticated movie codecs)
- APNG files are smaller than GIF or WebP ( 
http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp4.html )

Support for APNG is present for a long time in Firefox. Last year Apple 
added support for it in its Safari browser. This month support for APNG 
has been added to WebKit ( 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17022#c35 ).

Content creator are also interested in APNG. In 2013 Kickstarter project 
of APNG manipulation library became funded ( 
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374397522/apngasm-foss-animated-png-tools-and-apng-standardi 
).

As you can see, APNG format is on the rise. WebKit support became 
possible, when last year Max Stepin figured out how to implement APNG 
support with a little additional code, using vanilla (without APNG 
patches) libpng library ( 
https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=248547&action=diff ). I am 
planning to follow his way and implement APNG support in gdk-pixbuf in a 
non-intrusive way, with as additional little code as possible.

Adding of APNG support to GDK will enable its usage in vast amount of 
applications, in particular image viewers of Gnome, Mate, XFCE and LXDE 
desktops.

I am looking forward for reply of Gnome devs interested in mentoring my 
project.

Piotr Jurkiewicz