Support for arbitrary frame rates
Updated: Aug 2, 2020
What should I name ACME’s first API Release from Sweden? Why ‘Abba One’ of course. ACME supports its Co-Founders and engineers to work from anywhere in the world that supports enough internet bandwidth to get their work done. It's a dream come true for us wandering souls of software engineering. Here I am sailing on the Baltic Sea a few hours before finishing this 'Abba One' release:
Api.acme.codes now supports arbitrary frame rates for any animation. Our default frame rate is 30 frames per second, or 'fps'. Since ACME's primary deliverable is an mp4 file of a detailed animation of your QR code and all of its code tiles, we consider this frame rate to be the best for a sense of quality for your scanning audience. This is especially true when the animation includes your images, logos, or product messages. Since digital displays on computer systems can handle playing back almost any frame rate - unlike traditional mediums which tend to have fixed frame rates - ACME now offers any frame rate that best provides for the unique needs of each of our customers. Here's a list of different frame rates and the customers that might prefer them:
30 fps (default): The majority of ACME customers (so far). Almost all display systems can easily display an mp4 file of almost any resolution at 30 fps. This frame rate provides a significant sense of quality for the 'smoothness' it provides.
25/50 fps: For our friends in Europe displaying animated codes on television, this frame rate can be the best for translating and encoding onto mp4s animations targeted for broadcasting.
24 fps: This feature film standard is a nice baseline for acceptable animation smoothness, but allows for deliverable mp4 files of a smaller size, which in some instances can be a higher priority.
15 fps: Rarely used for mp4s, but frequently used by our clients requiring animated gifs. Gif files are great for clients needing the absolute broadest display support; gifs are playable on almost any computer regardless of the hardware and software decoding systems that may be present on them. The cost of this broad support however is a much less efficient file size encoding, so gif files can be very very large. One way to combat the large file sizes of gifs is to limit the fps to be as low as possible.