Method for animating images (like a movie) on iPhone without using MPMoviePlayer

Question

I need to be able to display an animation over a static image.

Given that MPMoviePlayer gives you no control over anything useful, the only way I can think to do t

Answer 1

For Animating Images in Sequence,

First take a array of images which you need to play.

Then give this array to animation and done.

Well Explanation Animation in Iphone: Series of images

Answer 2

As you have discovered, using UIImageView.animationImages does not work because it uses up all your system memory and will crash your app. You could use a timer and set the image property of the UIImageView each time the timer fires, the UIImage object you use as the contents would need to be loaded each time the timer fires. That is basically the same as the approach described in the other answer, except that it uses CALayer instead of UIImageView. Loading an image and changing the image contents each time the timer fires is an okay approach, but it will only be able to get your about 11 FPS on an iPhone for full screen images.

If you would like to use a working example that implements the UIImageView switching logic, then download this PNG Animation example project for xcode. I also provide the AVAnimator library, an optimized version of the same sort of functionality, it supports Quicktime Animation and APNG formats as well as compression.

Answer 3

You could use a Core Animation CALayer to host your animation, and swap a series of CALayers in and out of that main layer to perform your frame-by-frame animation. You can set the content of an image-frame-hosting CALayer to a CGImageRef using its contents property. A series of CALayers containing your images could be created and stored in an NSMutableArray as needed, then removed when done to minimize memory use.

You can set the transition duration between frames by wrapping the replaceSublayer:with: method call in a CATransaction, like the following:

[CATransaction begin];
[CATransaction setValue:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:0.25f] // 1/4th of a second per frame
                 forKey:kCATransactionAnimationDuration];   
[mainLayer replaceSublayer:[imageLayers objectAtIndex:oldImageIndex] with:[imageLayers objectAtIndex:newImageIndex]];
[CATransaction commit];

You might also be able to get away with swapping in and out the CGImageRef in the contents of your main layer, if your frame display time is short enough.