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Introducing GIFV

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Re: Introducing GIFV

#161

Post by polarix »

com2kid wrote: post #159

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…

right click -> save works in chrome canary, 39.0.2163.3 at least.

drag and drop does not, yet, but perhaps with this initiative it will be prioritized.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#162

Post by yincrash »

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?

It does sound like they are angling for a mime type. That way the server can detect if it accepts the mime type and return a html wrapped video player if it doesnt, and the mp4 file raw if it does.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#163

Post by Terretta »

Supermighty wrote: post #82
personZ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can't upvote you enough. Too few people realize that the server returned mimetype actually tells the browser how to handle the content.

Oh how I wish that were true.

It's what's intended, but it's not what's true. Usually this bites on video, but it even bites on, say, SVG:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10261460/internet-explore...

Ostensibly, this is to protect users. Quoting TechNet:

When files are served to the client, Internet Explorer uses the following pieces of information to decide how to handle the file:

1. File name extension, the corresponding ProgID and CLSID for the registered handler of that file name extension.

2. Content-Type from the HTTP header (MIME type), the corresponding ProgID, and CLSID for the registered handler of that Content or MIME type.

3. Content-Disposition from the HTTP header.

4. Results of the MIME sniff.

-- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787872(v=ws.10)...

Re: Introducing GIFV

#164

Post by hnha »

Mizza wrote: post #127

I think this actually in response to Gyfcat, who have been doing this exact same thing for a while, and eating up quite a lot of imgur's redditshare: https://gfycat.com/

gfycat does "the right thing", they use the free and open webm format.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#166

Post by darkstar999 »

gcb0 wrote: post #100
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?

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.

i-m-g-u-r pronounced "imager"

Re: Introducing GIFV

#167

Post by epidemian »

polarix wrote: post #161
com2kid wrote: post #159

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…

right click -> save works in chrome canary, 39.0.2163.3 at least. drag and drop does not, yet, but perhaps with this initiative it will be prioritized.

Dragging&dropping the video from that page into an email (Gmail) on another tab worked as expected. Don't know if Gmail is doing something special though.

I tried this on a desktop Firefox/Ubuntu. I'm actually quite surprised that it worked without any problems, considering the rough history of MP4 on Linux/OSS in general :D

Re: Introducing GIFV

#168

Post by Daiz »

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).

>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?

It's very unlikely to see that happen, since using H.264 doesn't cost a dime in royalties for sites like imgur that serve the content for free (ads don't count as per the H.264 licensing terms). The only trouble is really on Firefox and any other browser that wants to implement a built-in H.264 decoder, but nothing stops them from working around that via things like OpenH264 or by using system decoders and so on.

The same will likely happen with H.265/HEVC, as the recently published licensing terms made it completely royalty-free to use the format itself (including for commercial purposes, you have to pay royalties for that with H.264), and you only have to pay to distribute decoders & encoders.

Personally I wish browser vendors would just use whatever's installed on the user system for playing web videos, but for some reason that's not okay because "we need at least one unified always playing format for the web!" and then we don't get that anyway, as the whole WebM mess has clearly shown...

Anyway, since imgur is doing the conversion to video by themselves, there's not really any reason why they couldn't do both H.264 MP4s and VP8 WebMs... supporting only one format makes more sense if you allow direct user-encoded video uploads like 4chan does with its WebM support for example. Gotta say I don't like this whole "hey we took HTML5 video with 'autoplay loop muted' properties and branded it GIFV!" shtick, though.

Re: Introducing GIFV

#169

Post by GhotiFish »

personZ wrote: post #138
GhotiFish wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move on to what? The annihilation of firefox through a cheap licensing move?

Firefox supports MP4, and they changed their position two years ago when Google and Adobe weren't as all in as they claimed to be. Further through an appropriate media plugins that browser should support anything the platform supports, and it was pure dogma that had it refuse early on. Apple is never going to support WebM. This kills the format. There are hundreds of millions of devices that can hardware decode MPEG4…

well mp5 is right around the corner as well. Out of curiosity, what do you think the world is going to do when it's confronted with the choice between pushing out open source competitors or letting them in?

Re: Introducing GIFV

#170

Post by zxcvgm »

I heard of a HTML5-based alternative some time ago called the "ugoira HTML5 zip player". It uses a ZIP file of PNG/JPG files and renders the animation using JavaScript onto a . There's a detailed slide deck talking about it [1] and the source code is available too [2].

[1] https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/

[2] https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player

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