Serve Videos Instead of GIFs • Hacker News Board

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#91

Post by slavik81 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:22 AM UTC

garaetjjte wrote: post #73

zozbot234 wrote: post #3

No thanks, my "This Site Under Construction" pixel art would look awful as a video. And last I checked, video didn't even support transparency!

Most video codecs have lossless modes.

How do you create a lossless video from a GIF (or a series of images)? I think I've figured out how to do it for H.264 with ffmpeg, but I don't know how to do it for H.265 or AV1.

The main problem I've been encountering is that everything seems to be based on YUV, which makes it difficult to round-trip RGB data without loss.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#92

Post by RobLach » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #71

pmarin wrote: post #36

I don’t know what Twitter does with the gifs but it freezes my old netbook when I try to play them. I can play videos from youtube but I can not play a gif on Twitter!

They convert it to video

Strongly rebuts the case of the article if truly the cause.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#93

Post by dilap » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:36 AM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #58

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user u…

Amen, thank you. It's incredibly user-hostile to replace gifs with video.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#94

Post by robbrown451 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:38 AM UTC

RobLach wrote: post #55

dylan604 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tsk tsk. it's not like someone is going to need to write all of that HTML. some user will be doing this with twitter/IM/FB/etc where some dev will have implemented a node library that will have some method call to do this for you. it's not like anybody cares what the automated HTML in the background looks like.

Yes, exactly. All that needs to be built still. I can't just copy and paste a video into my messenger app for instance, which I have been able to do with gifs for ages.

True but the story is posted at HN, and there is a good chance one of your messenger app's devs or designers is reading it and saying "maybe we should add that bit of code".

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#95

Post by WalterBright » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:39 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #85

Not sure why he put this at the end: > One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That settles the never-ending debate for me. Now all he's done is make 1/2 of the population immediately discount everything else he said, regardless of its merit.

>> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.”

That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#96

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:44 AM UTC

MrStonedOne wrote: post #28

I'm still very much in the camp that moving pictures are distinct from video, and am eagerly waiting for a good replacement animated picture format before I move my website over to it. apng could have been nice, but never took off.

>apng could have been nice, but never took off.

There's nothing stopping people from using APNG. All major browsers have been supporting animated PNGs since 2017 (which was the year when Chrome finally added support for them).

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#97

Post by ddingus » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:44 AM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #58

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user u…

Truth.

Gifs have just enough capability to be really useful and very hard to replace.

I personally hate videos just served up. Not always, just most of the time doing that causes more grief than it adds value.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#98

Post by dguo » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:50 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #85

Not sure why he put this at the end: > One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That settles the never-ending debate for me. Now all he's done is make 1/2 of the population immediately discount everything else he said, regardless of its merit.

Author here.

I added the "for me" to try to convey that it's a personal choice. I don't care what pronunciation others use.

In this case, it doesn't bother me if someone chooses to discount what I wrote just because of that statement. That's on them.

I know it doesn't add much to the post. I just really liked the video of him accepting the Webby award. It was nice to see the person behind the technology, and I like letting creators decide things like pronunciation and casing. For example, I always make sure I spell "GitHub" instead of "Github" for no reason other than that's how they spell it themselves.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#99

Post by ken » Sun, May 17, 2020, 2:01 AM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #75

m463 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly. gif is a choice about the limitations of what can happen. A gif will play and repeat with NO SOUND POSSIBLE.

Imagine a browser prompt for ”This site would like to play audio” alá ”This site would like to send you notifications” Too bad that would break Youtube, so Chrome will never deliver it

That sounds awesome. Maybe not as a 'prompt' (those are awful, and don't scale), but some mechanism for requiring the user to confirm their intent to allow it.

Web browsers are the first real application sandbox that most people have experience with. It's a really good one. There's this rectangle on the screen, and there's a label at the top that says who delivered the content, and everything it can do happens inside that rectangle. Any way it wants to escape that box ought to require my approval.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#100

Post by dguo » Sun, May 17, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #58

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user u…

Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing.

They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.