[Interest] APNG support for QImageReader

[Bennett Ramirez]

Hello,

I am the current maintainer for a very niche game that works kind of 
like an animated chatroom. After having been transferred the rights to 
the project by its former maintainer, I have been receiving some 
grumbling from modders/content creators of the game due to the limiting 
nature of GIF - only 1-bit transparency, forced indexed colors, 
questionably ineffective compression, and so on.

Since all of the assets of the game are essentially animated images, I 
have been shopping around for other well-endorsed animated image formats 
(including APNG, WebP, MNG, and just sticking to GIF), and concluded 
that APNG, while being somewhat nonstandard, is the best option for the 
game, as it gives the smallest file size (according to this site: 
http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp.html), provides flexibility (in 
terms of the danger of losing color depth from dithering), and has 
relatively recently received support by the major desktop browsers.

However, I haven't seen any talk at all of APNG support except in 
QtWebKit, but my game obviously does not use QtWebKit. I don't know 
about MNG support, as it's even less heard of than APNG and probably 
could get dropped support at any time; and I'm eyeing WebP since there 
is good support for it, although the larger size in animation would 
defeat the purpose of moving away from GIF. Perhaps WebM could be 
another alternative, but the animated images in question are all less 
than 15 frames per second and are anime-style line art, so I'm not sure 
how well WebM could be assured to keep the animation lossless. Moreover, 
it's not supported by QImageReader.

So, I'm assuming that nobody has really ever needed to use APNG in their 
Qt project, and the people who needed APNG ended up building a 
full-fledged, in-house solution to the problem or used an external 
library. If this is the case, what is my recommended route for using 
high-quality/lossless animated images? Would the canonical solution be 
to just split all of the frames into PNG images, load them all in with 
some kind of sprite definition file, and then play them back as an 
animation? Would it even be justifiable, in this case, to create an 
original file format to handle these specific needs?

Sorry if I ask too many questions. Thanks for your help.