Animated GIF in Firemonkey

5
votes

I'm trying to display an animated GIF in a Firemonkey HD form using TImage but I do not see any methods for animation.

Using Vcl.Imaging.gifImg is not an option because types differ.

Can someone suggest a way to solve this problem or probably component to animate GIF images under Firemonkey?

The only way I find for now is:

  1. create TGIFImage instance and load the GIF image

  2. loop through gif.images:

    a. save current image to stream

    b. Image1.bitmap.loadFromStream [Image1 is FMX:TImage]

Is there any smarter solution?

1
delphidelphi-xe2gifanimated-giffiremonkey
if you would make imaging in a background thread, then the solution might be not that dumb as u think. Even if FMX had it natively - it still and it done exactly that way - via frame switching by background thread. otl.17slon.com might make threading a bit easier - Arioch 'The
u can also look at Vampyre Imaging library, it clais FMX support in Mercurial (but obviously not in releases made in 2009). However probably you would still implement frame switching worker thread. But i don't know. - Arioch 'The
Arioch 'The: isn't TTimer better and easier choice than using threads? They both end up in the app's message queue. Also one thread per GIF would be resource consuming... - iPath ツ
i don't know if timer would make smooth animation but surely u can try it. And i'd not use intermediate stream but rather just pre-unpacked array of bitmaps - Arioch 'The
@Arioch, the main problem is the bitmap. iPath is using VCL class in FMX environment and classes like TBitmap or TCanvas are not compatible. That's the reason of the stream usage; otherwise you would be able to use classes like TGIFImage or TGIFRenderer directly. And TTimer is prefectly sufficient for animations. If you'd use worker thread then you would have to synchronize UI with each frame rendering and that would, as iPath correctly said, enqueue messages into the UI main thread's message queue. Even TGIFRenderer itself uses timer, not a thread for rendering loop ;-) - TLama

1 Answers

5
votes

You can use TBitmapListAnimation with a single image which has each frame of the animation inside a long strip. eg, if your animation has 4 frames and is 32px by 32px then you need to create an image 128px wide by 32px high and add each frame side by side...

Then add a TImage to the form (you don't have to load a bitmap into this)

Add a TBitmapListAnimation with the TImage as it's parent

Double click AnimationBitmap and load your animation image strip

Drop down PropertyName and pick Bitmap

Set AnimationCount to 4 and AnimationRowCount 1 for this example

Set enabled to true

TBitmapListAnimation has good control over animation frame rates, reversing, looping and interpolation. I couldn't find a way to get a .gif to animate in FireMonkey2 but if you have the means to convert an animated .gif into a 'cartoon strip' then this is a good way to do animations.

PS This is Delphi XE3...so can't say if these components existed in previous version.