PNGs in NETMF

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

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Last year there was mention of adding PNG support to the .NET Micro Framework, however that never really surfaced. In fact, it's no longer even on the work list over on CodePlex. But never fear because we've gone ahead and added it; and it's open source.

Our first version of the library (available here) has support for both compressed and uncompressed PNGs. It's not without drawbacks though. Everything runs in managed code making execution time pretty unbearable.

A non-compressed 180x180 pixel PNG takes just under 20 seconds to decode on a 200MHz device and the same image with compression takes an excruciating 1 minute 17 seconds! And that's all without transparency.

It is open source though so I hope the community will step in and make some improvements.