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Introducing GIFV

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Re: Introducing GIFV

#151

Post by ssalenik »

wjoe wrote: post #125
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

They work for me, Firefox 32.0.3 on Arch Linux. You'll likely need some gstreamer packages installed (I think the package on Arch is gst-plugins-good for h264), same as for watching YouTube videos in HTML5 mode rather than Flash. There's also an about:config option "media.gstreamer.enabled" which needs to be set to true, but I don't remember ever having to set this myself.

I'm also on Arch. I had to install the 'gst-libav' package (possibly in adition to the gst-plugins-good?) for it to work. Thanks.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#152

Post by VikingCoder »

chillingeffect wrote: post #47
wbond wrote: post #13

Am 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?

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? => => =>

I made this new thing called xjson.

You upload JSON, and give you a URL that points to the same thing, except formatted as XML.

xjson!

Re: Introducing GIFV

#153

Post by infogulch »

tw04 wrote: post #84
nemo1618 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another user brought up a good point in the comments section of the imgur post: >GIFs being lossless, editable and universally supported are a pretty big part of what spawned this “culture of the GIF”. Sure, video editing tools exist, but I think most people would agree that GIFs are more "remix-able" than MP4s. It's important that we preserve both formats. (Or perhaps it's time for a modern lossless animation format…

I think the point is having a proper display option. Most photographers shoot and edit in RAW, but the final product is almost always displayed as a jpg. I don't think this is meant to eliminate gif entirely, just limit it to the areas it belongs, like editing as you pointed out. The only issue I see is that there needs to be an easy option to download the original pre-converted file.

But GIF is a terrible intermediate format. It's only 'lossless' in the sense that there's no advanced compression going on. But since it can only produce 256 colors gifs tend to be extremely lossy for video-like formats, often producing awful color banding.

Sure, if you're doing things with a very small color palette like pixel art or software tutorials then the current gif is fine for your needs, but gifs are increasingly used for video which typically has a huge color range in each frame, and we need something different for these cases.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#154

Post by jonny_eh »

eamsen wrote: post #116
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 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

The extension doesn't necessarily have to just say what the file is, but it can also say how it should be used. This is done with the .apk extension. apks are zip files, the but apk extension says it should be loaded as an application in Android.

It also isn't only useful for computers. It helps people to know what they're getting into when they open a file.

An mp4 with a gifv extension makes sense to me. It says "I'll be loaded without audio and will play in a loop".

Re: Introducing GIFV

#155

Post by bqe »

higherpurpose wrote: post #21
wlesieutre wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

This is not true. My work, written three years ago, showed that VP8 was inferior to H.264[1] at the time. A more recent paper showed that both VP8 and VP9 are inferior to both H.264 and HEVC[2].

[1]: http://blog.seancassidy.me/h264-and-vp8-compared.html

[2]: http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26...

Re: Introducing GIFV

#156

Post by mitchty »

davb wrote: post #74
untog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately .webm doesn't work in IE, OSX Safari or iOS. Though I'd far prefer these services work with both WebM and H264, and use whichever works best.

I wonder how many (huge) sites like imgur it would take saying "we're doing webm, if your browser doesn't support it you get a huge, slow GIF instead" for everyone just to settle on a single format? The whole debate is only hurting users and developers, while lining the pockets of MPEGLA (or whoever is responsible for h264 licensing).

How many? A lot. And in the mean time, if imgur started to do that, then it will soon start to have a "pdf link warning" in short order as masses of ios/safari/ie users basically segment themselves out of the loop.

In the meantime then the alternative sites will pick up in use because they aren't being dicks about a video format.

Additionally, what about devices that only have mpeg decoding? Basically you're saying screw you non webm supporting people and your battery life. We don't like your kind around here.

Its a great way to kill your site in short. Unless everyone does it at once and upgrades happen to support things, its at best a slow burn like firefox. But at this point webm doesn't have half the use cases as firefox did.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#157

Post by gcb0 »

johnhenry wrote: post #130
gcb0 wrote: post #105

imgur manages to be behind even 4chan on featureset and performance... and now its behind on standards compliance also.

Hasn't 4chan been doing this with webm for a while?

6months or a year. the owner even did a HN AMA of sorts.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#158

Post by gcb0 »

zobzu wrote: post #40
bhouston wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a marketing endeavor that is pretending to be a technical innovation.

Yep. Plus gfycat.com does that since a while now, but imgur comes as "oh look we're so innovative". " Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations" Hi we put a .gifv extension to mp4 can we HTML5 standard this non standard file extension of a standard format?! Riite.

even 4chan does that.

whish tumblr implements it with standards and do a huge campaign calling imgur BS

Re: Introducing GIFV

#159

Post by com2kid »

I cannot right click and save an MP4 video in my browser.

I cannot drag and drop it into an email.

As a regular end user, I can use approved sharing features only. As a developer, yeah, I can download it myself and rehost it somewhere that hopefully supports MP4 video.

The historical pissing match over how to best do animated PNG files is sad. An animated image format that is treated differently from videos is a nice thing to have.

People have entire folders full of appropriate reaction GIFs. With how MP4 video is treated online today, such a thing is not possble.

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