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MNG (pronounced ming) is a public file format for animated images.
The name stands for Multiple-image Network Graphics.
MNG is closely related to the PNG image format. When PNG development started in early 1995, developers decided not to incorporate support for animation, not least of all because this feature of GIF was little used at the time. However, work soon started on MNG as an animation-supporting version of PNG.
Version 1.0 of the MNG specification was released on 31 January 2001. MNG is currently not as widely supported as PNG. Nonetheless, Netscape and Konqueror have native MNG support, and MNG plugins are available for Opera and Internet Explorer. Mozilla originally supported MNG, but native support for MNG was removed in version 1.5a and Mozilla has not supported the format since. Safari does not support MNG.
The MNG developers hope that in time MNG will begin to replace GIF for
animated images on the World Wide Web, just as PNG has already begun to do for still images.
The structure of MNG files is essentially the same as that of PNG files,
differing only in the slightly different signature
(8A 4D 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A in hexadecimal)
and the use of a much greater variety of chunks
to support all the animation features that it provides.
Images to be used in the animation are stored in the MNG file
as encapsulated PNG or JNG images.
Two versions of MNG of reduced complexity are also defined:
MNG-LC (low complexity) and MNG-VLC (very low complexity).
These allow applications to include some level of MNG support
without having to implement the entire MNG specification.
MNG does not yet have a registered MIME media type,
but video/x-mng can be used.
APNG is proposed as an alternative to MNG.
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