Show HN: Gifcap, a browser based client-side GIF screen recording tool

Post by jchw » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #29

I really loathe GIF for screen recordings: they are huge, they look terrible due to the 8-bit color pallet and low frame rate (in a desperate attempt to make them less huge), encoding is slow (in my experience at least, probably no hwenc available?) and they are expensive to render. There’s hardly any reason to use GIF when you can use a video instead — Imgur did exactly that with their GIFV which is just an H.264 vi…

Post by jacobush » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

greggman3 wrote: post #32

oefrha wrote: post #29

I really loathe GIF for screen recordings: they are huge, they look terrible due to the 8-bit color pallet and low frame rate (in a desperate attempt to make them less huge), encoding is slow (in my experience at least, probably no hwenc available?) and they are expensive to render. There’s hardly any reason to use GIF when you can use a video instead — Imgur did exactly that with their GIFV which is just an H.264 vi…

I find this particularly annoying. Back in the early 2000s I wrote some small app to generate static webpages for photo collections to be put on CD because OSes couldn't browse jpgs natively but browsers could. Now the problem has gone the other way, my iPhone and Android save HEIF but I can't use those on the web. I have to first go through a manual conversion process. It's like my computers have regressed 20 years.

Post by jakub_g » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #29

I really loathe GIF for screen recordings: they are huge, they look terrible due to the 8-bit color pallet and low frame rate (in a desperate attempt to make them less huge), encoding is slow (in my experience at least, probably no hwenc available?) and they are expensive to render. There’s hardly any reason to use GIF when you can use a video instead — Imgur did exactly that with their GIFV which is just an H.264 vi…

Post by xfalcox » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

joaomoreno wrote: post #2

Author here. Added some cool features like trimming and cropping, to make it easier for you to nail on the particular area of your screen and keep the recording to a minimum. Let me know what you think!

Post by dividuum » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

Zyst wrote: post #34

oefrha wrote: post #29

I really loathe GIF for screen recordings: they are huge, they look terrible due to the 8-bit color pallet and low frame rate (in a desperate attempt to make them less huge), encoding is slow (in my experience at least, probably no hwenc available?) and they are expensive to render. There’s hardly any reason to use GIF when you can use a video instead — Imgur did exactly that with their GIFV which is just an H.264 vi…

I use .webm files all the time as stand-ins for GIF, and more and more sites/apps have support for inline playback nowadays. You can strip the audio out completely from those files, and have like 20 second recordings that map out to ~1-2MB vs +10MB for GIF. All in all, it's pretty great.