AnimGIF support

[Dr.Flay]

Support for animated artwork would be nice
I have loads of animated album covers but forgot about them as they don't animate in Winamp.

[victhor]

AnimGIF would be an animated GIF? I'd like to see that but for the skinning support side (would make animated layers way much easier..)

[dro]

Wasn't aware that animated artwork was even a thing. This is a tricky one to do as there's not a viable way at the moment to do it consistently across all skin modes without compromising things more so for modern skins (aka needs an external window to be used).

As for within a skin engine, wouldn't the animated png (apng or mng) option be better than gif due to better resolution / colour depth vs 256 colours max (iirc). Definitely I can see that having some potential though is something that would need to be kept it mind if other plans come to fruition.

-dro

[victhor]

Also I never heard about animated artwork, but these look cool.

GIF support mostly aims for skinner's convenience (though PNG animated layers are quite good), but I think it also opens the door to some new kind of interaction with the GIF "trend". Most people just use it for jokes or memes, but on the artist's community there's a lot of great stuff, in more than one ocassion I thought about using this kind of animations / gif as some sort of visualization.

[Dr.Flay]

I agree about preferring PNG, as MNG and APNG offer full quality images and better support for decent transparency effects.
This is a long term guilt-edge finishing touch for the project, as I can see that it is just a bit of bling.
I am also aware that on the fly scaling and rendering of AnimGIF can be a pain to get working.

I had not contemplated the implications for skins, but indeed I can see that animated image format support would allow for some interesting dynamic skin effects, with theoretically a minimal CPU impact.