Set Animated .GIF As Background Android

Question

I am new to Android and I am having trouble playing an animated .gif file in the background of my layout. When I run the application the background is a single frame of the

Answer 1

As Martin says, Android does not support GIFs. As a workaround, Android offers Animation List/AnimationDrawable. You will need to convert the GIF into individual frames [.png files]. I use GIMP for the conversion

This GIF can be broken down into its frames:

Save them as frame01.png, frame02.png, and so on, and create an animation-list XML file, say, progress_animation.xml

<animation-list android:id="@+id/selected" android:oneshot="false">
<item android:drawable="@drawable/frame01" android:duration="50" />
<item android:drawable="@drawable/frame02" android:duration="50" />
<item android:drawable="@drawable/frame03" android:duration="50" />
....
<item android:drawable="@drawable/frameN" android:duration="50" />

To begin the animation, you need to cast the image to an AnimationDrawable, and call start() on it

AnimationDrawable progressAnimation = (AnimationDrawable) yourImageView.getBackground();
progressAnimation.start();

Answer 2

The gif animation is supported in Android when GIF animation is played as Movie.

Take a look.

Answer 3

put your gif image in app\src\main\assets

make a class like

public class MyGifView extends View {
Movie movie;
InputStream is;
long startTime;

public MyGifView(Context context) {
    super(context);
    try {
        is = getResources().getAssets().open("anim.gif");
        movie = Movie.decodeStream(is);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

@Override
protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
    canvas.drawColor(Color.WHITE);
    super.onDraw(canvas);
    long now = System.currentTimeMillis();
    if (startTime == 0) // first time
        startTime = now;
    int relTime = (int) ((now - startTime) % movie.duration());
    movie.setTime(relTime);
    float scalefactorx = (float) this.getWidth() / (float) movie.width();
    float scalefactory = (float) this.getHeight() / (float) movie.height();
    canvas.scale(scalefactorx,1);
    movie.draw(canvas, scalefactorx, scalefactory);
    this.invalidate();
}

}

add a layout somewhere in your xml activity_layout (backgroundFrameLayout). Usage in your activity onCreate():

FrameLayout frameLayout = findViewById(R.id.backgroundFrameLayout);
frameLayout.addView(new MyGifView(this));