On 22/10/10 17:35, Dan Nessett wrote:
We are upgrading to 1.16. One of the things we would
like to do is
support animated gifs. Unfortunately, there is a surfeit of information
about this issue, but nothing I have read so far gives a clear guideline
how to go about providing such support. The history of this issue is
found in at least the following places:
A Village Pump thread:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphics_village_pump/GIF_thread
Some bug tickets, specifically:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22041
That is a Wikimedia sysadmin issue and does not apply to other
installations.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23063
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23063
While the first ticket is marked resolved/fixed, the latter two (which
cover the same or at least a very similar issue) are marked new. The last
entry in the 3rd bug ticket is dated 2010-05-08.
That is two copies of the same link. See below for a discussion of it.
So, I wonder if anyone is able (and is willing) to
supply the following
information:
+ The version of imagemagick that we should install for animated gif
support.
+ Whether 1.16.0 is sufficient for non-buggy animated gif support.
+ Is there any configuration required for animated gif support, other
than setting $wgMaxAnimatedGifArea?
+ Is there anything else we need to do to support animated gifs?
MediaWiki and ImageMagick have both supported animated GIFs since
forever. You don't need any special version.
The recent problems with animated GIFs at Wikimedia were related to
changing usage patterns, specifically an increasing tendency to
convert large videos into animated GIF format. ImageMagick handles
large animated GIFs in a very inefficient way. This led to several new
resource limit features being developed, in order to provide more
useful and stable error messages, as opposed to letting ImageMagick
hit a memory or time limit.
If your users stick to using animated GIF in its traditional
applications, e.g. MySpace-style sparkling flourishes and looping
diagram animations, then you should have no trouble. If your users
wish to convert hours of MPEG video to animated GIF format and have it
scaled by your servers, then your choice of MediaWiki version and
resource limit configuration will determine what sort of error message
the users see. Ideally, this should be an informative "image too
large" error, rather than a browser timeout because the server has
gone into swap and died.
-- Tim Starling