Basically, would it be possible to have it where we don’t need a third part engine or application, not even steam, to run things like: gifs, apngs, and other animated pictures (possibly even personal custom snippets of youtube vids [or other streaming media vids]) on the background of desktops and/or screensaver of the OS? I feel this would elevate the OS above others that require third party (either/usually paid sub-scription, buggy, or shady when you get them) tools. At the very least gifs would be nice to have in full animated glory.
Could really put Haiku ahead of the other big popular OS systems. Unless there is some form of money or heavy restriction that prevents the os from doing so? I get performance is one complaint, but that should be up to the user to make that decision on their oc, not the higher ups who give us the os. Specially PAID OS like apple & windows.
Haiku probably does this but I have not a chance to test it out.
If it is a serious issue to allow stuff like this, just have a setting option to enable doing it with a disclaimer explaining the risks & problems doing it?
Probably not worth it in the big grand scheme of things, but I thought I would try giving it a chance and ask.
In the BeOS days there was an app (sorry, forgotten the name) that displayed an animation as a kind of layer between the desktop and the applications. Personally, I found it incredibly annoying.
We know from a recent thread that MediaPlayer can play animated Gifs with a little cheating on the MIME types. So all you really need to ask for is to make MediaPlayer able to spawn desktop replicants. I have no idea how hard that would actually be.
It can, but it’s currently problematic. WebPositive is not, but how could you spawn desktop replicants of it… I doubt the code that makes WebPositive able to play gifs correctly can be extracted as a standalone application. But if that was possible voila, we have a nice image viewer/gif player, which can then be spawn as a replicant for whomever likes animated desktops.
Another place to look may be Moe. That definitely supports animation, although IIRC it uses input files in a non-standard file format. A version of Moe that sat on the desktop rather than following the current window, plus a file format converter, might do the trick.
You can’t ember webkit easily as a replicant… with webkit2 it will be easier, but the thing you would want to use here is probably translators or the media kit…
It would stil be very stupid to run an entire web browser just to play a gif…
There are at least two libraries to decode GIF files available in HaikuDepot (libgit and libnsgif). They both support animated GIFs. If you want to make a GIF viewer, you can probably write one in half a day by opening a BWindow, adding a BView to it, decoding frames using one of these libraries, and using a BMessageRunning to schedule the frames for drawing at the right time.
If, instead of tying your library directly to a specific GIF library, you tweak the translator API to return the multiple frames and their timing info in some way, and make your app use that, you can get support for more animated image formats as people support the protocol to return several frames in other translators.
If you do it using a web browser, you can turn that into a several months project. People sure like to take the big and complicated way sometimes…