Welcome to the MNG Home Site, maintained by Greg Roelofs with the behind-the-scenes help of Glenn Randers-Pehrson.
Mirrors:
The MNG site is very closely related to the PNG home site; in fact, it grew out of
the PNG site in August 1998. Both sites are hosted courtesy of the
ever-so-spiffy folks at SourceForge.
Mirror sites have been provided
in Texas and the Netherlands courtesy of Gerard
Juyn and Triple-T Software,
in the UK courtesy of Dave Beckett and the UK Mirror Service (formerly HENSA Unix),
in France courtesy of Ulrich
Massamba,
in Denmark courtesy of Guan
Yang,
and
in Russia courtesy of Peter Kohts.
Thanks!
The MNG pages are still evolving, but what exists so far is listed below. Most people will probably find the small-but-growing list of MNG-supporting applications to be of the greatest interest. Additions, updates and corrections are always welcome:
An Informal History of MNG (below)
News (and more history) of the MNG developers
MNG Technical Documentation (various formats and mirror sites)
Applications with MNG Support
MNG-supporting Hardware
MNG Programming Information:
MNG and JNG Images
Links to Other MNG Resources
PNG home page
MNG (pronounced ``ming''), is short for Multiple-image Network Graphics, as one might gather from the title of this page. Designed with the same modular philosophy as PNG and by many of the same people, MNG is intended to provide a home for all of the multi-image capabilities that have no place in PNG.
Although the idea of MNG has been around almost as long as PNG has, serious design discussions didn't begin until May 1996, and even then there was considerable debate over whether to make MNG a dirt-simple ``glue'' format around PNG or a complex multimedia format capable of integrating animations, audio and even video. By mid-1998, MNG had settled down to something in between; while it has fairly extensive animation and image-manipulation capabilities, there is no serious expectation that it will ever integrate audio or video. (Those are best handled by MPEG, particularly MPEG-4.)
The MNG specification was promoted to ``1.0 status'' on 11 January 2001, in accordance with an official vote of the MNG developers, and the final, edited version was released on 31 January 2001.
MNG includes a number of interesting features:
Of course, MNG also shares a number of PNG's best features:
MNG has a separate mailing list for discussions about the specification, programming, and so forth:
MNG does not share PNG's MIME type:
In fact, MNG's design and feature list is compelling enough that there were already several applications with some level of MNG support before the spec was even frozen in May 1999--this despite the fact that there was no MNG reference library available for programmers to use. (There is now; Gerard Juyn's libmng implements almost all of the MNG spec for decoding and is what gives Mozilla, Netscape 6 and later, and Konqueror their MNG support. No word yet on whether the embedded NetFront browser uses libmng.) In other words, each of the original half-dozen applications represented a completely independent implementation written from scratch. Way to go, folks!
![[MNG (apps) now!]](img_mng/mngnow-bearcy.png){kind=small}