Serve Videos Instead of GIFs • Hacker News Board

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#171

Post by wegs » Sun, May 17, 2020, 12:37 PM UTC

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #63

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…

I use a chrome-based browser, but because it's missing some component, probably due to stupid DRM crap, most videos on most sites don't play for me. However, some of them do work. I don't feel like I'm missing much. But GIFs are certainly way more usable than video. I'm also writing web-based forum designed for backwards compatibility with older browsers, so GIFs will always be the default for me.

Chrome has insane behavior where it will only autoplay videos from web sites Google trusts. If I put a video on my own web site and domain (muted, autoplay, etc.), it won't autoplay. If I put a gif up, it will.

Google claims this doesn't apply to videos with muted, but at least in my Chrome, it does.

Muted-by-default makes complete sense to me. I hate it when a web site makes noise. But no autoplay (even muted) is broken.

So is having Google act as the arbiter of which web sites get to autoplay (Google's Youtube) and which ones don't (my personal domain). That's a huge conflict-of-interest and hugely anti-competitive behavior right there. It crushes the little guy.

Disclaimer: Google claims this is based on some kind of objective metrics.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#172

Post by bsanr2 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 12:49 PM UTC

bsanr2 wrote: post #15

thereyougo wrote: post #2

I mean I like GIFs, but when I'm checking specific subreddits or going over Imgur frontpage. Companies are using too many GIFs nowadays in their blogs.

I'd really rather not we go down the rabbit hole of "class"ifying websites by their method of serving animated clips. GIFs have trade-offs, but on balance they're the most useful for their purpose.

Can't edit, but if this seems non sequitur, parent originally said something along the lines of, "Websites that use GIFs seem to have low-quality content."

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#173

Post by Intermernet » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:18 PM 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.

The G in GIF is pronounced like a J, as in José.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#174

Post by ubercow13 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #131

FalconSensei wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you try to save, you get a webm or mp4 video

webm seems like a fine gif replacement. I don't know why Apple is such a little bitch about formats though.

Doesn't using webm require sigining away their right to ever sue Google for patent infringement?

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#175

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:47 PM 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…

[deleted]

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#176

Post by ubercow13 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #157

MrStonedOne wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its a os one. windows, and most other os's, allow copy and pasting images as image data in the clipboard, but can only handle video links , there is no way to natively copy and paste the video contents.

> windows, and most other os's, allow copy and pasting images as image data in the clipboard OSX has pasteboard types for png and tiff, yet that doesn't preclude copy/pasting JPEG or SVG. So no it's probably not "a OS one".

Does a JPEG you copy get pasted as a PNG though?

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#177

Post by ubercow13 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #20

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!

Transparency is supported now. https://codepen.io/pbhj/pen/dyPzwEj

Of course this won't work on iOS

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#178

Post by ubercow13 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

slavik81 wrote: post #91

garaetjjte wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

x264 has an RGB mode that avoids this but I don't think the resulting files would be playable in any browser

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#179

Post by willis936 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #174

willis936 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

webm seems like a fine gif replacement. I don't know why Apple is such a little bitch about formats though.

Doesn't using webm require sigining away their right to ever sue Google for patent infringement?

No. Originally, the webm license required that you couldn’t sue google for patents related to webm. They switched to BSD in 2013.

Meanwhile, there have been numerous patent suits against google from other big companies around VP8, VP9, and webm. Google isn’t the bad guy in this story.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#180

Post by ubercow13 » Sun, May 17, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

cheeaun wrote: post #132

I had an issue serving videos on my site before and encounter a bug where Mobile Safari won't play the video if there's no `Accept-ranges: bytes` header. The header is somehow removed when served from Cloudflare https://community.cloudflare.com/t/mp4-wont-load-in-safari-u... I had to create a page rule to exclude videos from being served from Cloudflare CDN.

I think they fixed this at some point, or at least, I have dealt with the same issue at various points and at the moment my videos work fine on iOS served through Cloudflare.