Animated GIF - not working properly

Question

Hi,
I'm trying to get an animated GIF working in my swing program. I am drawing on a JPanel using paintComponent.
Here's the thing: It will animate, (faster then it should) and then pause animation for 5 seconds, then animate again. I am trying to achieve constant animation, at the framerate in which is set inside of the GIF file. Is there a better method to use then what I am using? It's not a repaint problem, as I am repainting constantly. Here's what I got:
String filename = "myimage.gif";
Image img = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(filename);
g.drawImage(img, x + 28, y + 79, this);A code snippet would be helpful as I am only two weeks into Java and have difficultly reading the Sun documentation.
Thanks for reading,
Nate

Answer 1

Does that entire code snippet appear in the paintComponent method? It should be more like this,
String filename = "myimage.gif"
Image img = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(filename);
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
     g.drawImage(img,x+28,y+79,this);
}You shouldn't try to get the image from the toolkit everytime. Just get it once, and everytime you paint the image, the next frame will be painted.
To introduce a constant delay you can use javax.swing.Timer to simply repaint the panel whenever you want to. Here's sort of a basic example
import javax.swing.ImageIcon;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.Timer;
import java.awt.Image;
public class GifAnimation extends JPanel
        implements java.awt.event.ActionListener {
    private Image img;
    private Timer timer;
    private int delay;
    public GifAnimation(String fileName) {
        java.awt.Toolkit toolkit = java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();
        //The image icon will load the image
        img = new ImageIcon(toolkit.getImage(fileName)).getImage();
        if (img.getWidth(null) == -1 && img.getHeight(null) == -1) {
            System.err.println("Unable to load image: " + fileName);
        }else {
            setPreferredSize(new java.awt.Dimension(img.getWidth(null),
                                                   img.getHeight(null)));
        //in milliseconds
        this.delay = 100;
    public int getDelay() {
        return delay;
    public void setDelay(int delay) {
        this.delay = delay;
        if (timer != null) {
            timer.setDelay(delay);
    //This method is called when a component is connected to a native
    //resource.  It is an indication that we can now start painting.
    public void addNotify() {
        super.addNotify();
        if (img.getWidth(null) != -1) {
            timer = new javax.swing.Timer(delay, this);
            timer.start();
    public void removeNotify() {
        super.removeNotify();
        if(timer != null) {
            timer.stop();
            timer = null;
    public void actionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent e) {
        //you can alternatively use paintImmediately(), but there are
        //going to be certain consequences to using that.
        repaint();
    public void paintComponent(java.awt.Graphics g) {
        //Clears the background before drawing the next frame
        super.paintComponent(g);
        if(img.getWidth(null) != -1) {
            int x = (getWidth() - img.getWidth(null))/2;
            int y = (getHeight() - img.getHeight(null))/2;
            g.drawImage(img,x,y,this);
}In a GIF file each frame has a duration specified in hundreds of a second. And each frame also has an offset position (not all the frames need to have the same width or height). I can show you how to load this information from the file, but I'm not sure if it would bring major confusion. It requires the use of javax.imageio.ImageIO and javax.imageio.metadata.IIOMetadata . It also requires a recursive method to search the image's metadata for the needed information (a bit overwhelming for a person two weeks into java).