convert an animated SVG?

[jerome cukier]

Hello all,
usually when I do d3/protovis chart I provide a static image as an
alternative for lesser browsers.
is there a way to do the same with animated SVG, like a conversion to
either an animated gif or a movie format?
best,
jerome

[Chris Viau]

I use to take a video capture with Camstudio or command line tools (xvidcap, ffmpeg).

[jerome cukier]

yes that was my initial thought but I wondered whether there was a -
painless- way to process an svg file.

On 23 nov, 16:05, Chris Viau <christophev...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I use to take a video capture with Camstudio <http://camstudio.org/> or

[jerome cukier]

that said, let them switch out of IE. camstudio it is.

[Jason Davies]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 07:38:19AM -0800, jerome cukier wrote:
> yes that was my initial thought but I wondered whether there was a -
> painless- way to process an svg file.

If your visualisation can generate SVG for each frame, you could render
each frame into a PNG using something like Batik and then compose them
into an animated GIF (or simply show each PNG at a particular frame rate
using JavaScript). I'm not sure that's *painless* though. :)

Assuming you're using D3's transitions, this may not be that
straightforward as you'd have to fix the frame rate somehow: override
Date.now() perhaps, and maybe override window.requestAnimationFrame to
serialise the SVG.

So yeah, some kind of video capture is probably simplest for now if you
don't need absolute control over the frame rate.

--
Jason Davies, http://www.jasondavies.com/

[Mike Bostock]

There's another example of using D3 with node-canvas to render images:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/master/examples/node-canvas/us-counties.js

Mike

[Jon Frost]

There we go, that way the various SVG --> Canvas instructions could
effectively be streamed down to clients. I'll have to try that, and
thanks again for your trailblazing!

And now that node.js now runs on windows it will likely be built out
even faster due to that much more interest.