Part of the reason GIFs are so popular is because of the limited colorspace. The new colorspace and compression sort of turn this into an entirely new medium not a better GIF. Other than the sometimes better filesize I don't really understand the appeal of any of this. Especially since support is far from that of GIF.
Introducing GIFV
91–100 of 205 posts
Re: Introducing GIFV
#92I'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?
part of the balancing test is
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
Re: Introducing GIFV
#93Why can't we just deal with video without hiding it behind "GIF"?
GIF seems to have a better UX than video for its particular use case: inline, control-free, looping, audio-free.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#94Earlier 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.
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.
You can't put element tags on a imgur.com/rickroll.mp4 raw file link.
An important feature of gifs is that you know they will not make noise. Videos however like to blare obnoxious music and yell at you to grab your attention.
If it somehow became a browser convention that .gifv videos will not play sound by default, then users would be much less anxious about clicking and sharing .gifv links compared to .mp4 links.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#95"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.
We have a format for something like that — WebP. As a bonus, it's less processor-intensive, which makes it suited for things like tiling backgrounds, or embedding many of them on a page — a huge problem for MP4s that anyone who's enabled the on their services has no doubt already discovered.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#96I think bhuston said it best. >This is a marketing endeavor that is pretending to be a technical innovation. Most of us are asking, why isn't it format X, or format Y. When they are clearly superior in quality and compression. The answer is they don't have marketing power. GIFV is directed at increasing attention to imgur. By trying to make more sites adopt it as their image/video hosting platform. Since imgur alread…
>Better compression, better quality
this isn't true
Re: Introducing GIFV
#97Earlier 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.
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.
If you take a look at the source of the .gifv link from their blog posting it looks like this is exactly what they are doing:
edit: This is interesting, though:
~/temp curl -I http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.mp4
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Last-Modified: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 20:44:27 GMT
ETag: "2342c1e692a327e61be8395bf4d9109c"
Content-Type: video/mp4
Further edit: Passing a user agent to curl also causes the raw mp4 file to be returned, with no redirection. Anyone know how they are doing this redirection for browsers but not for curl?
Re: Introducing GIFV
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, why are they calling mp4 files gifv files? Is it somehow cooler? Can I start serving .html files as .awesome files? And .js as .kicka$$ files? and .mp3 as .boomin'? GET "index.awesome" at this rate, why not re-write all of html so it's cooler? => => =>
Can I start serving .html files as .awesome files? Sure, go ahead. Extensions in a URL have little to do with the actual type of content, and .html has long been abandoned by dynamic systems, who originally went to extensions being an implementation detail, and on many current systems being a lie (e.g. the .aspx extension that actually runs a PHP page that returns an HTML5 file). They're using a URL extension to sign…
I could see them recommend that “GIFV” be standardized as video/gifv+mp4 (and it wouldn’t need standardization if it provided it as video/vnd.imgur.gifv+mp4), which would provide the necessary signals in a fairly standards-compliant way, as well as a clear indication that mp4 is the fallback.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#99I'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?
Came to post this too--it's funny but will surely be DMCA taken down.
Re: Introducing GIFV
#100Am I misunderstanding something here? I don't see anything other than an .mp4 video served via a tag from a URL that ends in .gifv. I was interested in seeing how it worked to look into supporting it for a mime type detection library I've written. The blog post mentions submitting a specification to the relevant standards organization. Are they planning on creating a new mp4 ftyp and registering a mimetype with IANA?
because lame marketing.
the imgurl community is always asking for more servers and bandwidth, and the imgurl team is only delivering crappy feature on top of crappy feature that only makes things worse.
their goal is not pleased users, its a big fat huge "exit". thats why new feature and buzzwords abound. it impresses investors, which is their goal.