Display Animated GIF

Question

I want to display animated GIF images in my aplication. As I found out the hard way Android doesn\'t support animated GIF natively.

However it can display animations

Answer 1

Some thoughts on the BitmapDecode example... Basically it uses the ancient, but rather featureless Movie class from android.graphics. On recent API versions you need to turn off hardware acceleration, as described here. It was segfaulting for me otherwise.

Here is the BitmapDecode example shortened with only the GIF part. You have to make your own Widget (View) and draw it by yourself. Not quite as powerful as an ImageView.

import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.*;
import android.os.*;
import android.view.View;

public class GifActivity extends Activity {
    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(new GifView(this));
    }

    static class GifView extends View {
        Movie movie;

        GifView(Context context) {
            super(context);
            movie = Movie.decodeStream(
                    context.getResources().openRawResource(
                            R.drawable.some_gif));
        }
        @Override
        protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {   
            if (movie != null) {
                movie.setTime(
                    (int) SystemClock.uptimeMillis() % movie.duration());
                movie.draw(canvas, 0, 0);
                invalidate();
            }
        }
    }
}

2 other methods, one with ImageView another with WebView can be found in this fine tutorial. The ImageView method uses the Apache licensed android-gifview from Google Code.