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Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

dannyguo.com

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Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#221

Post by Dylan16807 »

egfx wrote: post #219
Dylan16807 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The format was designed so you could do simple animation in a way that otherwise acts like an image format. For actual video style content, it never saved space. And codecs for video have massively improved over the years, while gif hasn't.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#222

Post by willis936 »

egfx wrote: post #219
Dylan16807 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interestingly, a lot has changed in computers in the past 33 years. When gif was made there were no good lossy compression algorithms that had been developed, let alone implemented efficiently enough to run on computers of the day. This changed by the early 90s.

>he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs

And they have been for the past 25 years.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#223

Post by Dylan16807 »

surround wrote: post #127
cyberowl wrote: post #122

Can you embed video in email and have it play by default? Can you drag and drop videos onto your desktop to save? Can you upload videos anywhere that accepts an image? Can you loop and make sure it always plays on a webpage? If no, I'm not using video. No one gives a crap about your technical specs. Videos suck as a user interface.

Gifs suck as a user interface. It’s not just the huge file size, they also - Must load entirely before playing (whereas video formats can load as they play) - Don’t show any progress/buffering icon while they load, so it just looks like the page has frozen - Lack the ability to skip/scrub through the video (if I miss a part, now I have to wait the entire thing to loop) - Don’t have audio Actually, these aren’t really…

> Must load entirely before playing (whereas video formats can load as they play)

Huh? What browser are you using, that's not normally true.

You can even stream live content via gif. http://gifsockets.twolfson.com/

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#224

Post by thayne »

jsjohnst wrote: post #183
johncolanduoni wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lossy 24-bit color webp image (which is encoded with VP8's intra-frame compression) is likely to look better than a 8-bit color palette lossless gif.

GP is talking about APNG not GIF. APNG has 24bit with alpha transparency.

But this is in the context of what to use instead of gif. The point is, for many gifs (like say a short clip from a movie, or funny video) you can get a lossy webp that looks better than a gif, but and is smaller than an APNG.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#225

Post by fomine3 »

jjcm wrote: post #103
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 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…

It looks like WebP Animation only supports I-frame like GIF Animation. I-frame only video should not be efficient so not suitable for video, looks better to just use VP9. (maybe good for icons)

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#226

Post by fomine3 »

nelaboras wrote: post #198
egfx wrote: post #60

Hold the mic drop. Those that claim videos are superior over GIF's will never understand. The only benefit that a video tag has over a gif is a smaller file size. Animation's and meme's, cinimigraphics and simulations are more than simply video. How about for all other animated graphics? And file size is increasingly becoming less and less of a factor at all. (disclosure: I built https://gif.com.ai )

file size is not a problem in big cities of the developed world. Many poorer countries and even remote regions in rich countries are left behind.

Even developed world, people uses metered LTE connection.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#227

Post by HighSaysBob »

carapace wrote: post #202
chaosbutters314 wrote: post #108

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…

I only ever got to participate in live user testing once. We shelled out for the room with the one-way mirror and everything. Watching normal people use our thing was most excruciating and educational. We were literally hopping up and down on our side of the glass, hooting and shouting. It was brutal.

At my job we try and do this weekly or every other week with real users testing our apps. You can’t ever guess what they want without seeing them use it and asking questions.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#228

Post by FalconSensei »

chaosbutters314 wrote: post #108
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'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…

Many developers didn't realize yet that the average person actually don't care about technology. They want to press a button to send an audio message, search and watch cat videos, read some news, with less friction as possible. They are not even remotely interested in how it works.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#229

Post by ByteJockey »

egfx wrote: post #137
chrismorgan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Firefox Nightly on Windows, my first visit to that site (with video autoplay disabled and uBlock Origin operating, but probably nothing else out of the ordinary) is just utterly broken. Header mostly visible, but breaking apart as you scroll, and no content below the header ever visible.

I'll admit that It's not really that optimized for FireFox (at all) at the moment. It may be because of a browser trick it uses on Firefox to get the bookmarklets to resemble Chrome Extensions. I'll look into Firefox more now that it's relying less on the Chrome Extension and providing more import options browser side. Thanks for the report.

Works just fine on firefox on linux.

I even have the privacy settings set to strict, which usually breaks things.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#230

Post by slavik81 »

ubercow13 wrote: post #178
slavik81 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, that's the best solution I've found for truly lossless conversions, but for wide compatibility the only real choices seem to be animated image formats like GIF or APNG.

I started looking for lossless because my screen captures looked like absolute garbage even at high bit rates, but in retrospect, I bet the problem was the downscaling done by the 4:2:0 chroma profile. It might be that 4:4:4 would fix the awful appearance.

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