Haven't things like gfyCat been doing HTML5 video from GIF's for a while?
Twitter's GIF hack
11–20 of 160 posts
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#12This is not true:
"A GIF is literally a sequence of independent images squeezed into the same file. An mp4 video can take advantage of all kinds of fancy compression techniques like keyframes and forward-predictive frames."
That's not why the mp4 is smaller. A GIF is not [just] independent images, you can have each frame reuse pixels from previous frames.
The mp4 is smaller because lossy jpeg compression is used on each frame, while the gif stores each frames losslessly.
This has implications from the predictive frames as well - the jpeg is lossy, so two almost similar parts of the images can be considered "the same", while the gif is not, so they must be identical in order to compress that way, and the realities of video noise makes that unlikely.
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#13This is on a fully-patched RHEL6 workstation: http://i.imgur.com/NleqJTD.png Another example of "use bleeding-edge tech or go fuck yourself" from the modern web.
Support for mp4 isn't bleeding-edge tech on other operating systems / distributions, unfortunately. It's a couple of years old in terms of being supported by Chrome; it's supported in Firefox as of last August.
At this point, desktop configurations that can't play mp4s are at risk of being considered "broken."
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#14I had noticed that. Because of flashblock. Yeah, a 20+ years file format doesn't do compression between frames, who would have thought...
Except that it does do that, the article is wrong.
As I wrote in a different comment the actual reason is lossy jpeg compression, not intra frame compression.
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#15This is on a fully-patched RHEL6 workstation: http://i.imgur.com/NleqJTD.png Another example of "use bleeding-edge tech or go fuck yourself" from the modern web.
It does weird things on some mobile devices that do support it, too, mostly interrupting the audio player (on some devices, movie playback grabs the audio).
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#16I would think it's to avoid any traces of steganography... naaah I'm just kidding....
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#17This is on a fully-patched RHEL6 workstation: http://i.imgur.com/NleqJTD.png Another example of "use bleeding-edge tech or go fuck yourself" from the modern web.
I suspect some implementation issues rather than a GFY attitude, it doesn't work on FF or Chrome on OSX 10.9. Safari works though.
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#18This is on a fully-patched RHEL6 workstation: http://i.imgur.com/NleqJTD.png Another example of "use bleeding-edge tech or go fuck yourself" from the modern web.
Support for mp4 isn't bleeding-edge tech on other operating systems / distributions, unfortunately. It's a couple of years old in terms of being supported by Chrome; it's supported in Firefox as of last August. At this point, desktop configurations that can't play mp4s are at risk of being considered "broken."
Is it really that difficult to supply a free format like WebM in addition to patent-encumbered H.264? If you only supply H.264, you're cutting out Firefox on OS X, Chromium, and Opera.
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#19This is on a fully-patched RHEL6 workstation: http://i.imgur.com/NleqJTD.png Another example of "use bleeding-edge tech or go fuck yourself" from the modern web.
You choose not to use the appropriate software to experience what is being offered. This is akin to riding a decrepit horse on a racetrack while whining about how everyone else that is riding a healthy horse is going faster and having a better experience than you.
Just upgrade.
Re: Twitter's GIF hack
#20"Videos allow Twitter to leverage the browser. This means play, pause, and seek, but also cool things like slow-motion. Think your GIF is funny now? Wait til you see it in slow motion."
Gifs have built in slow motion, it's called waiting for the 10mb file to download frame by frame upon initial play-through.