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[karmic] support .mng (multiple-image network graphics)

Asked by thom

[karmic koala / 9.19] .mng files (multi-image network graphics)

Since karmic there is no application anymore to view (or convert from) .mng files
Really, not even one single application !

After much googling I found out that Gimageview would be able to display .mng
I had to fetch it from the Hardy repositories (since it has been dropped from the recent repos)

GIMP -> only mng export
Konqueror -> no mng support in ubuntu
Gimageview -> packet not in repository
(imagemagick) convert -> error "convert: SHOW is not implemented yet"
Firefox -> .mng support dropped
gThumb, eog, mplayer, vlc, totem -> no .mng support

Scary is, though, that converting TO mng is still supported in Karmic (one way ticket to oblivion).
(even libmng is still in the repositories).

still there are some programs that use .mng as output format (not many though)
also, some odd websites still use .mng as replacement for animated .gif
no other open standard available a.t.m. a.f.a.i.k.

For the sake of the ability to access old/odd stuff , it would be very nice to see at least one program supporting .mng

Could there be a kind of "mng2gif" or "mng2avi" converter ?
Or, if not, at least Gimageview back in the repos until there is a simple converter ?

Thanks for reading my post, :-)

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Juan Carlos Inostroza (jci) said : 		#1

Hi,

I downloaded a couple of MNG files and converted it to GIF file:

$ gm convert movie2.mng movie.gif

so far, it worked by installing GraphicsMagick (available in Ubuntu's repos). I guess you could do the same using ImageMagick as well.

No luck tho for .avi :

jci@zaphod:/tmp$ gm convert movie2.mng m2v:test.avi
execvp failed, errno = 2 (No such file or directory)
gm convert: "mpeg2encode" "/tmp/gm4aHvwt" "test.avi".
gm convert: Delegate failed ("mpeg2encode" "%i" "%o").

Seems that mpeg2encode program is nowhere to be found (mpeg2enc does not work even doing a symlink). Found that the program is located here:

http://www.mpeg.org/pub_ftp/mpeg/mssg/mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz

But I won't recommend downloading, building and using coming from an untrusted source.

That way

ci@zaphod:/tmp$ gm convert movie2.mng m2v:test.avi

does work, but you should know the risk of untrusted sources. Hope this helps.

--j

Revision history for this message
thom (tsk) said : 		#2

Hi Juan,

Thanks for the tip....now testing GraphicsMagick
no success at the moment but according to the -help it should work.
have to tinker a bit with it....it wil work, I'm sure ;-)

For all the other convert-jobs I use ffmpeg.
I will also check-out if I can redirect the output of GraphicsMagick directly to ffmpeg via YUV-pipe.

Thanks for the answer, Juan. I appreciate it

Revision history for this message
thom (tsk) said : 		#3

Hi Juan,

Thanks for the tip....now testing GraphicsMagick
no success at the moment but according to the -help it should work.
have to tinker a bit with it....it wil work, I'm sure ;-)

For all the other convert-jobs I use ffmpeg.
I will also check-out if I can redirect the output of GraphicsMagick directly to ffmpeg via YUV-pipe.

Thanks for the answer, Juan. I appreciate it