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Introducing GIFV

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Re: Introducing GIFV

#111

Post by astrodust »

sauere wrote: post #8

Can't we just all settle for .webm? The cancerous patented MP4/H264 combination must die.

WebM is a format nobody asked for and nobody wants.

It's claimed that WebM is patent free, but this is impossible. There's just too many patents in the video space, any one of which could surface and tank this format.

Remember GIF itself was, for a while, subject to patent problems.

At least with H264 companies like Cisco are releasing implementations with indemnity from that (http://www.openh264.org/) which I think is better than coming up with some wonky new format.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#113

Post by revscat »

bhouston wrote: post #102
revscat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: If you open up zvATqgs.mp4 you are redirected to a .gifv file, which is an HTML document. It has a video tag that mutes the audio. 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: "2342c1e692a327…

They need to get the raw MP4 file eventually so the browser can display it, it can not always redirect.

I understand that, I'm just curious as to the mechanism that they are using.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#114

Post by Igglyboo »

arrakeen wrote: post #12

an 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)

Gif on the right is bigger, slower, and loses a lot of color information. Really surprised to be honest.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#115

Post by Igglyboo »

aikah wrote: post #15

I dont get the trick.Is it gif or a h264 video inside a "gif" container? looking at the source code,I see a video tag.

It's an h264 video, they serve it with the .gifv extension but that's just marketing.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#116

Post by eamsen »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #43
jawns wrote: post #22

"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 don't need to tie this behavior to a new video extension or a specific video format. A more sensible approach would be to allow video sources in and restrict their profile to GIF-like behavior.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=895131

Re: Introducing GIFV

#117

Post by Pxtl »

Recoil42 wrote: post #95
xpaulbettsx wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

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.

Indeed. I'm disappointed that the new generation of codecs (h264/webM) has won out for small internet videos because they seem to be processing-power beasts.

Full-screen mpeg-2 (DVDs) was doable with a $40 device over a decade ago. Video compression is definitely a worse-is-better space.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#118

Post by Wilya »

revscat wrote: post #97
bhouston wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: If you open up zvATqgs.mp4 you are redirected to a .gifv file, which is an HTML document. It has a video tag that mutes the audio. 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: "2342c1e692a327…

I managed to get a 302 response code in curl by passing both a Firefox user-agent and an accept header.

Neither the accept header alone nor the user-agent alone are sufficient. It seems they are testing for both.

  curl -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0" -I http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.mp4

Re: Introducing GIFV

#119

Post by m_myers »

ssalenik wrote: post #17

I 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

GIFs just work. GIFVs might or might not work. That's a huge difference.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#120

Post by Pxtl »

wlesieutre wrote: post #58
u124556 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Flas…

100 auto-playing videos will still bring your computer to a screaming halt.
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