Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

I really like the interface, it's very clever, only problem I'm having is you have the 5 second gif limit but that isn't explained anywhere and there's no indication of how long 5 seconds is on the timeline.

I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long have 50% of it grey.

I've used another site for this before (called Gifsoup: http://gifsoup.com/) and they charge about $5/m for the option to make longer gifs with no watermark, I think this would be something you could offer. I would definitely convert as I prefer your interface.

edit: The gif quality is pretty terrible, can that be improved?

edit edit: If you click "post to forgif.me" and then have to login and then login it loses the URL, you have to go back to find it again and click the button again.

Re: Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

#6

Post by Toshio » Sun, Aug 12, 2012, 4:31 PM UTC

How long should it take to split a video, I think it's been 5 minutes already, and it's still chugging away.

Re: Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

#7

Post by sgehlich » Sun, Aug 12, 2012, 4:33 PM UTC

Toshio wrote: post #6

How long should it take to split a video, I think it's been 5 minutes already, and it's still chugging away.

Yeah the server it's running on is pretty damn slow. We will move to another server in the next days. Unfortunately we don't show the progress of the video splitting right now. Try again if it takes to long. Sorry for that!

Re: Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

#8

Post by s04p » Sun, Aug 12, 2012, 4:35 PM UTC

Hemospectrum wrote: post #4

Is the name a recursive apology for its own terrible pun?

In that case it would be a great pun, wouldn't it?

Re: Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

#9

Post by sgehlich » Sun, Aug 12, 2012, 4:36 PM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #5

I really like the interface, it's very clever, only problem I'm having is you have the 5 second gif limit but that isn't explained anywhere and there's no indication of how long 5 seconds is on the timeline. I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long have 50% of it grey. I've used another site for this before…

Thanks for your suggestion, I really appreciate it! The idea of greying the indicator out is nice, I'll implement it tomorrow.

Yes, we were already thinking about providing such a premium service, we'll see what we can do. Right now it's just an experiment, let's hope it'll get bigger :)

Edit: We slice the video into frames by using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, the gif encoder of ffmpeg uses a pretty bad color palette, I already dived into the encoder code but didn't manage to improve it. I'll work on it though.

Edit edit: Yup, known issue, gotta fix that today!

Re: Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

#10

Post by the-kenny » Sun, Aug 12, 2012, 4:42 PM UTC

Works pretty good: http://forgif.me/gm