Displaying a Cinemagraph
January 6, 2012 5:48 AM   Subscribe

What is the minimum hardware needed to display a cinemagraph?

Is there any type of digital picture frame (or other simple hardware) that can display the animated gif's that make up a cinemagraph?
posted by mbarryf to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I'm sure the hardware can display them, but I doubt the standard software in the frames know what an animated gif is. If you can find one that hacker types have figured out how to load custom firmware, I'm pretty sure it would be able to handle it.

If I was intent on doing this NOW, I would buy the cheapest/biggest android tablet I could find and put it in a picture frame.

(By the way, that is one of the best ideas I have seen in a while. It repurposes an old idea in a way that is actually respectful of the old idea! Who'd a thunk it?)
posted by gjc at 6:04 AM on January 6, 2012


Best answer: "Cinemagraphs" are, as far as I can tell, simply high-res animated gifs. There's nothing special about them other than they're bigger and more detailed than your standard gif like Nyan Cat or whatever. The article you link doesn't suggest that they're doing anything with the format as such, just using better quality images.

As you can see here, getting animated gifs to display on standard el-cheapo digital picture frames is something a lot of people are trying to do, mostly without much success. It's even been asked on the Green before. It's a question of whether the software in the frame supports that format, and though there are a lot that will support actual video formats like .avi or .wma or whatever, animated gifs seem to be left out fairly frequently.

You're probably looking for something a little more robust than a digital picture frame, something like a cheap tablet. Fortunately, it's not a huge different in price. A lot of decent quality picture frames go for $75-125, and there are plenty of tablets that will do what you want in the $100-200 range. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Android supports animated gifs. I know mine doesn't.
posted by valkyryn at 6:10 AM on January 6, 2012


I using and Android tablet right now and I can see animated GIFs on it.
posted by Mahogne at 3:03 PM on January 6, 2012


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