I can tell this thread is gonna be a gold mine for Shit HN Says
Introducing GIFV
51–60 of 205 posts
Re: Introducing GIFV
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for being free, WebM was not a "superior compression format" to H264 last I heard. Has it changed recently?
I think it all but caught up lately in VP8 vs h.264 performance. Google kept improving VP8 performance. However, webm has also added VP9 support recently, which is clearly superior.
Is VP9 in much use (compared to VP8)? I've definitely heard good things about it, but I have no idea how well supported it is or whether anybody has it in use yet.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#53"With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a .gifv extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year." This is bizarre. GIF…
Browsers should display GIFVs without transport controls (unlike ), and ignore any audio tracks that are included - basically construct a limited MP4 profile and handle it appropriately. It's a useful construct imho.
Ah, that actually makes some sense, as far as a file format specification. So GIFV would offer a subset of the functionality of a typical video file format (most notably, absence of sound). Although I would think it would make more sense to just strip out the audio, rather than instruct browsers to ignore any audio tracks.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#54I don't know if its just me, but the GIFVs embedded on the page dont load for me, unless I click on them to open them in a page on their own, and the second one doesn't play even in this case. Firefox 32.0.3 on Linux
That's probably because Firefox on OS X (32.0.3) doesn't yet handle H.264, which is what these GIFV files really are.
FF on Windows (32.0.2) does support H.264, and the GIFV files play as expected. IIRC, FF on Android was the first version to get H.264 support, which it's had for some time now.
EDIT: You can check codec support for your current browser+platform at YouTube's HTML5 page, below. I briefly dug around in Bugzilla for this issue, but haven't found it yet.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#55"With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a .gifv extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year." This is bizarre. GIF…
Browsers should display GIFVs without transport controls (unlike ), and ignore any audio tracks that are included - basically construct a limited MP4 profile and handle it appropriately. It's a useful construct imho.
Why not just have an attribute or two in tag that sets it to be no volume and whether there should be transport controls? That sounds more useful to me and applicable across all video formats.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#56"With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a .gifv extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year." This is bizarre. GIF…
No, probably not anyone who is reading hackernews, but imgur has a much wider audience. GIFV will help communicate 2 things: 1) this file is audio free 2)this file is safe (people don't generally worry about getting a virus from a gif).
Actually, exploiting bugs in image parsers has been a classic vector. Certainly tiff, jpeg and BMP to my memory. When i worked at symbian we had an svg parser vulnerability that went underreported.
And given the slew of bugs Google keep finding fixing in libraries like ffmpeg, there are likely lots of bugs lurking in something as complex as an MP4 player...
Re: Introducing GIFV
#57They also won't look like shit because of the limited colour range.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Browsers should display GIFVs without transport controls (unlike ), and ignore any audio tracks that are included - basically construct a limited MP4 profile and handle it appropriately. It's a useful construct imho.
So this is actually making mp4 worse? Talk about innovation.
There are a lot of uses for dumb, audio-free video files. Web forums, for instance. You can allow users to embed them without worrying about 100 different auto-playing videos with sound on your page.
Plenty of ways to implement that and I'm not sure this is the best approach, but it's not just "worse video". More features is worse, not better, a lot of the time. Like when people used to build entire websites in Flash before the iPhone's lack of flash player finally made them stop.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#59I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet: why is imgur allowed to use copyrighted material to promote this new feature? I'm pretty certain they didn't get permission to use those clips from Tron or Star Wars. Does the fact that they were created by a user somehow give them immunity?
Re: Introducing GIFV
#60an animated gif is not necessarily a video clip, but it seems that i'm in the minority these days. here's a gif by nicolas sassoon, which format would you prefer? http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gif (1.3 MB) or http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gifv (3.9 MB)
Simple solution: Don't use gifv for all gifs! For a lot of gifs this will massively reduce loading times.