MNG Applications

As of April 1999, there were a total of six applications available that supported MNG in some form or another, with at least one or two more under development. The six available applications are listed; four of them were new in 1998.

Viewpng

The original MNG application, Viewpng was Glenn Randers-Pehrson's test bed for PNG- and MNG-related features and modifications. It has not been actively developed since May 1997, and it runs only under IRIX on Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations.

ftp://swrinde.nde.swri.edu/pub/mng/applications/sgi/

ImageMagick

This is a viewing and conversion toolkit for the X Window System; it runs under both Unix and VMS and has supported a minimal subset of MNG (MHDR, concatenated PNG images, MEND) since November 1997. In particular, it is capable of converting GIF animations to MNG and then back to GIF.

http://www.wizards.dupont.com/cristy/ImageMagick.html

MNGeye

Probably the most complete MNG decoder yet written, MNGeye was written by Gerard Juyn starting in May 1998 and runs under 32-bit Windows. Its author has indicated a willingness to base a MNG reference library on the code in MNGeye.

http://www.3-t.com/3-T/products/mngi/Homepage.html

pngcheck

A simple command-line program that can be compiled for almost any operating system, pngcheck simply prints the PNG chunk information in human-readable form and checks that it conforms to the specification. Partial MNG support was added by Greg Roelofs beginning in June 1998. Currently, the program does minimal checking of MNG streams, but it is still useful for listing MNG chunks and interpreting their contents.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/apps/pngcheck.html

PaintShopPro

PSP 5.0 uses MNG as the native format in its Animation Shop component, but it is not clear whether any MNG support is actually visible to the user. Paint Shop Pro runs under both 16-bit and 32-bit Windows.

http://www.jasc.com/psp.html

XVidCap

This is a free X-based video-capture application for Unix; it captures a rectangular area of the screen at intervals and saves the images in various formats. Originally XVidCap supported the writing of individual PNG images, but as of its 1.0 release, it also supports writing MNG streams.

http://home.pages.de/~rasca/xvidcap/

While support for MNG is undeniably still quite sparse, it is nevertheless encouraging that a handful of applications already provide support for what has been, in effect, a moving target. Once MNG settles down (plans were to freeze the spec by May 1999) and is approved as a specification, and once some form of free MNG programming library is available to ease the burden on application developers, broader support can be expected.

New programs will be listed on the MNG applications page, http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/mngapps.html.