Getting animation frames from server?

[PankaB]

Hi. I was thinking of using the canvas tag to display the frames of an animation. But maybe that is not even necessary?

Online I have a database of animations. They are stored as .flv video files, but those don't play on iPads, etc.

Also online are folders containing the actual frames, in sequentially numbered PNG files. I was thinking about just downloading and displaying those via some JavaScript and/or PHP.

The total size of download would get up to maybe 12 MB for any particular animation. Is it reasonable to expect a browser even mobile to handle that?

Ultimately I think the user would select repeatedly animations from a gallery, so ideally a page would be able to let go of the memory used showing previous animations.

I could generate animated GIFs but that would reduce the fidelity and quality, and I am not sure how much memory it would really save in the long run?

Thanks for any advice!
Patrice

[holyhttp]

If you have a .flv version of the animations why not convert them into other format such as .mp4 you can play in iOS devices.
Using individual images png or gif is not such a great idea because of multiple http requests involved and the size of individual files

[PankaB]

To do that, I would need a way to convert the sequences of PNG frames into an .mp4 file from within a PHP script. Do you know of any way to do that? I could also convert the .flv to .mp4, but it would need to be done within the script. There are thousands of existing animations that would need to be bot-converted too, I guess, unless they were done the first time someone viewed them. Any suggestions on an mp4 from flv or frames converter?

Also, I seem to remember from previous attempts that we could not get mp4 files to loop. Does anyone know if they will loop correctly?

Thanks!

[holyhttp]

The adobe media encoder will certainly allow you to convert the .flv file into the .mp4 format.