Firefox SVG Animation Patch
I wanted to try out an SVG Animation example that someone sent me but Firefox currently doesn't have support for this. Bug 216462 contains a patch with a work in progress implementation of SVG Animation so I looked into trying it out.
Unfortunately it has suffered some bitrot recently so I made the changes to get it to apply on the current CVS. There were some problems causing crashes which I fixed up and I've updated the bug with the adjusted patch.
Jeff Schiller commented previously in the bug about wanting to try it out but not being able to build so I made my builds available for him to play with. His latest blog post mentions the results of trying the build out. Thanks for giving it the run through Jeff!
If you want to have a play with a build with the SMIL patch applied, you can try my experimental builds:
The original author of the patch has a status page and a page of tests that can be used to try it out. I don't know how up to date those are with regards to the current version of the patch though.
On the video front, I've updated some of the binary video builds to fix some bugs exposed by the excellent Metavid site - a <video> early adopter.
Categories: firefox, smil, video
Unfortunately it has suffered some bitrot recently so I made the changes to get it to apply on the current CVS. There were some problems causing crashes which I fixed up and I've updated the bug with the adjusted patch.
Jeff Schiller commented previously in the bug about wanting to try it out but not being able to build so I made my builds available for him to play with. His latest blog post mentions the results of trying the build out. Thanks for giving it the run through Jeff!
If you want to have a play with a build with the SMIL patch applied, you can try my experimental builds:
- Windows, SMIL + Video Patch with Theora Backend
- Linux, SMIL + Video patch with Theora backend
- Linux, SMIL + Video patch with GStreamer backend
The original author of the patch has a status page and a page of tests that can be used to try it out. I don't know how up to date those are with regards to the current version of the patch though.
On the video front, I've updated some of the binary video builds to fix some bugs exposed by the excellent Metavid site - a <video> early adopter.
Categories: firefox, smil, video
Labels: mozilla
posted by Chris Double at 5:23 PM
15 Comments:
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your help with this. I wrote the original patch and was hoping someone would pick it up and continue the work. Seeing as no one has done that I'm considering working on it again but I'm just wondering -- is anyone really interested in SMIL these days? And what for?
Thanks,
Brian
We're interested because Acid3 requires SMIL, at least :-).
I think people are interested by animation as they are interested by SVG.
Acid3 should not be the only reason to implement SMIL. I don't think SVG & SVG animation could be very used as standard in web page (or web app), Flash kill it. But it is a very good language for Mozilla based app.
Brian, I think it would be great if you were able to continue the work. I think you'll find there's quite a few people out there interested in it.
I've done the bits on the patch so I can get some demo's I want to play with working in Firefox, but am unlikely to do much more due to being flat out with video.
Brian
I have played around with SMIL a little in SVG. It is really useful where the animation is not known ahead of time so Flash is not an option. Picture getting an XML stream of location and times like aircraft positions. I have an application that takes the results of a thunderstorm tracking model and animates the storm location synchronized with raingage readings using SMIL. Since the information is never known ahead of time, I don't think Flash could be used here.
Bruce
Definitely, peaploe are interested smil and we need it for simple animations - it's true that CPUs are today strong enough to do it on even script level, but that tax paid for this is enourmous and makes other scripting on the page slow and unreliable. SMIL support, at least the basic one, for GECKO would be more than welcomed by a lot of developers and even more - HTML coders...
hi, i am kinda no one for you people, i am just a guy from Guatemala who is entering in web development, and i have to say i'm really interested in this, since i reallly dont like adobe flash, and i would bet there's a lot of people who thinks the same way XD ...
Acid3 is ok, but what would be really great is to have a standarized way to have nice animations and eye-candy stuff without using non-free stuff like adobe flash ...
Thanks everyone for your encouraging comments. I've spoken to Rob and it seems I won't be able to work on it soon enough (thought I might still have the chance to work on it at a later stage) so someone else may jump in instead. We'll see!
How would one get involved with helping to get this patch going? I'd like to see SVG animations work in FF. I'm quite sad they didn't include better support for it.
Anthony, if you go to the bug I think you'll see someone has set up a mercurial repository containing the patch and is working on it.
You could contact them and see if you can contribute.
I'm getting into this SVG stuff and like it! Tried out some animation on Chrome, Opera and Safari, works great! Then I try Firefox and no go :( Even in version 3.1? Has this been abandoned in Firefox?
Thanks,
-Oliver
I use SVG quite often and it works fine, so it definitely hasn't been abandoned.
This post has been removed by the author.
This post has been removed by the author.
Just to say thank you for keeping the SMIL ball rolling. this language rocks and will hopefully have it's day in the sun sooner rather than later. i'm no developer, just want to be using it
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