Animation in GUI

Is there a way to load an animation (.gif/.mov) into a GUI? Maybe loading it onto axes or just as a background image.

[Adam Danz]

Since this question continues to get many views years later, here's how to load GIF images to AppDesigner buttons.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/discussions/highlights/132277-new-in-r2020a-app-button-animation-truecolor-images

Answer 1

[Fangjun Jiang]

imread() can read .gif files. For movies, only .avi files and MATLAB movie structure are supported. See aviread(), movie2avi().

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

If the question is whether one can load an image that "plays itself", then the answer is NO.

MATLAB does not directly support displaying animated GIF files; you would have to convert them to movies.

You can use movie() to play movies, but I believe it is synchronous -- certainly there are no asynchronous controls.

I cannot seem to find any Mathworks video players with asynchronous controls -- though if you have the Computer Vision toolbox you could use http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/vision/ref/vision.videoplayerclass.html and use something like a timer callback to schedule frames.

The Image Processing toolbox has implay() but no obvious ways asynchronous ways of controlling it.

The MATLAB File Exchange Contribution videofig might be your best bet, in that you could strip out what you do not need and add in an auto-repeat.