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Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

dannyguo.com

211–220 of 242 posts

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#211
post #103

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 think there's a chance this can happen when AV1 starts to gain adoption. Webp had a chance - you can have well encoded, looping video in a .webp container that operates exactly like an image. The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem. AV1 has support from every major player in tech, and .avif images support gif functionality just fine. Until that happens tho…

>AV1

I often trip on that, was similarity with AVI accidental or intentional..?

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#212
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The color of gif is unacceptably bad (8 bit indexed) That's like saying the character limit of a tweet is unacceptably restrictive or a painting by Picasso is unacceptably blocky. You can use any color in a GIF but you can only use 256 colors at a time. This makes the GIF recognizable as high art. You can point to any GIF and say "That's a GIF!". I suggest you browse https://gifcities.org to see GIF gold. It is imp…

No. It’s like saying sharing a Picasso painting with transformatively bad compression while not trying to change the art is worse than compression that doesn’t. If I took a tweet and changed every third word when trying to share it with others, would that be acceptable? If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If yo…

> If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If you need the high frequency information then you can tune the encoder and still get a filesize that is an order of magnitude smaller than gif.

and that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. If you downscale to a gif you get the graphical effects for free.

https://i.imgur.com/8LdcFn5.gif

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Producers don't care, they want you to see their content if you go to their site.

If they're willing to abuse technology to ruin my day, I don't see why their opinion should have any weight.

You're missing the point. Why do you think you get a say in whether their opinion has any weight? As of right now their opinion of how it should work IS how it works until all of their wasteful bytes are rendering and animating in your face.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#214
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest comm…

> Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome. A lot of sites override the ri…

If the right click menu itself is the problem, that kind of is the browser's fault. Especially when firefox has an override for that, pressing shift.

> Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.

Copy is already broken and weird for images, since it doesn't get you the original file. But if you fixed that, I would expect pasting to give me a 'transferring...' window as long as the browser is still open and it can't be fed from cache. That wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. (And being unable to feed from cache wouldn't be unique to video at all. Image downloads already ignore the cache all the time.)

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#215
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It’s like saying sharing a Picasso painting with transformatively bad compression while not trying to change the art is worse than compression that doesn’t. If I took a tweet and changed every third word when trying to share it with others, would that be acceptable? If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If yo…

> If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If you need the high frequency information then you can tune the encoder and still get a filesize that is an order of magnitude smaller than gif. and that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. If you downscale to a gif you get the graphical effects for free. https:…

Downscaling to get a limiting effect 'for free' is not 'high art'.

https://twitter.com/cyangmou/status/1254089487870722048

Pixel art is an art form, but you have to deliberately design around the medium. And there are other ways to deliberately design something to fit the gif format. But someone converting a generic animation or video to gif is not gaining anything.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#216
post #148
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood that argument; why would an acronym need to preserve the exact sounds of the letters in the original words? I don't think it's very uncommon for them not to. "UNICEF" is not pronounced "yoo-ni-chef", "POTUS" is not pronounced "po-thuss", "OSHA" is not pronounced "oss-huh", etc.

I think it was a joke (an attempt to start a classic flame war with a classic argument)

If so it's a bad joke to use, because a million people that didn't think that argument through use it unironically.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why anyone else thinks they have a say in how to pronounce a name. I hope I don't meet anyone who tells me I'm pronouncing mine incorrectly.

Gif isn't a name, it's an acronym. The creator of an acronym doesn't get to decide how it's pronounced -- it follows the rules of standard english if it's an acronym of english words. Yes english has a lot of edge cases, but it has defaults too. In this case, english rules dictate that any word that starts with "gif" is a hard g sound. You will not find an english word that starts with "gif" with a soft g. The only r…

> In this case, english rules dictate that any word that starts with "gif" is a hard g sound. You will not find an english word that starts with "gif" with a soft g.

English rules tell you how to pronounce "gi" at the start of a word, and the "f" doesn't change it.

Girl. Giraffe. Giddy. Gin. It can go either way.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little crap the user won't care about if it doesn't work as they expect. I end up being the only person saying "If I was the user, I'd expect this. And if I was doing this, I expect this behavior". Instead, they act as if the user has a PhD in cs, and instead, the use…

While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.

When you run the user studies to tell me what's good, I'll believe you. Until then, I'm using the last published user studies which were Microsoft's work leading up to Windows 95. :P

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#219
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If you need the high frequency information then you can tune the encoder and still get a filesize that is an order of magnitude smaller than gif. and that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. If you downscale to a gif you get the graphical effects for free. https:…

Downscaling to get a limiting effect 'for free' is not 'high art'. https://twitter.com/cyangmou/status/1254089487870722048 Pixel art is an art form, but you have to deliberately design around the medium. And there are other ways to deliberately design something to fit the gif format. But someone converting a generic animation or video to gif is not gaining anything.

Much of what art is, is serendipity, accident and discovery. If you’re overly deliberate your not creating high art.

Anyway I just find it funny that gifs were invented to solve the problem of over sized video and now he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#220

> Each image in a GIF is limited to a color pallete of 256 colors Don't let this fool you into thinking that you cannot render a true color image with GIF! It's 256 colors PER FRAME, each of which allows for... dum-dum-dum... TRANSPARENCY. Do you see the potential or do you see the potential? Get all your colors, split into 256 groups and then render all pixels of each group as a separate frame, leaving the rest tran…

Set delay to zero and it will be treated as a tenth of a second. Browsers treat delays of '0' and '1' as mistakes. The fastest a gif will go is 50fps.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160318174811/http://www.humpy....

In the old days it was even worse. Delays under 3 or 6 or 10 centiseconds were all unreliable in some browsers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151031034345/http://humpy77.de...

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