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Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

dannyguo.com

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Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#101

Post by saghm »

WalterBright wrote: post #95
jedberg wrote: post #85

Not sure why he put this at the end: > One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That settles the never-ending debate for me. Now all he's done is make 1/2 of the population immediately discount everything else he said, regardless of its merit.

>> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".

I've never understood that argument; why would an acronym need to preserve the exact sounds of the letters in the original words? I don't think it's very uncommon for them not to. "UNICEF" is not pronounced "yoo-ni-chef", "POTUS" is not pronounced "po-thuss", "OSHA" is not pronounced "oss-huh", etc.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#102

Post by m463 »

nikanj wrote: post #75
m463 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly. gif is a choice about the limitations of what can happen. A gif will play and repeat with NO SOUND POSSIBLE.

Imagine a browser prompt for ”This site would like to play audio” alá ”This site would like to send you notifications” Too bad that would break Youtube, so Chrome will never deliver it

What's weird is that the outlook web interface can generate sounds under firefox. I think I have everything turned off but meeting notifications (somehow) make sound.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#103

Post by jjcm »

FalconSensei wrote: post #58

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user u…

I think there's a chance this can happen when AV1 starts to gain adoption. Webp had a chance - you can have well encoded, looping video in a .webp container that operates exactly like an image. The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem. AV1 has support from every major player in tech, and .avif images support gif functionality just fine.

Until that happens though, I just don't see .gifs ever losing traction. I still need to upload gifs to slack if I want autoplaying/looping behavior without user interaction, I still need to embed .gifs in my confluence pages, and when documenting user interactions in github readmes gifs are still king.

FWIW I've made a small user script for encoding gifs in a two pass approach (as most gif encoders I've seen do a pretty shit job). If anyone wants it here's the script: http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh

(to use, just type `./gif.sh -s=SIZE -f=FPS input.mp4 output.gif`)

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#104

Post by franciscop »

saghm wrote: post #101
WalterBright wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".

I've never understood that argument; why would an acronym need to preserve the exact sounds of the letters in the original words? I don't think it's very uncommon for them not to. "UNICEF" is not pronounced "yoo-ni-chef", "POTUS" is not pronounced "po-thuss", "OSHA" is not pronounced "oss-huh", etc.

As a Spaniard, that's exactly how I would pronounce those acronyms. Time to learn a bit more about English :)

Funnily enough, in Spanish "gi" is pronounced "ji" as in "Girar" (pronounced Jirar), while "gui" is pronounced like "gi" and "güi" is pronounced "gu-i". But "GIF" in Spanish is still pronounced with a soft "g", contradicting the general rule.

Edit: wait Google Translate says those are pronounced that way? https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#105

Post by FalconSensei »

dguo wrote: post #100
FalconSensei wrote: post #58

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user u…

Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing. They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.

Thank for you reply. And of course, you have a good point. If what is important to you is saving space and bandwidth, then serving videos is probably the best solution.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#106

Post by FalconSensei »

RobLach wrote: post #92
FalconSensei wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They convert it to video

Strongly rebuts the case of the article if truly the cause.

In case of twitter, there's an important difference in uploading video vs gif. Although a gif is converted to video, it will autoplay and loop without any user control available, just as it was a gif (sadly, you can't download/drag as a gif). If you upload as a video, if will behave like regular video

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#108

Post by chaosbutters314 »

FalconSensei wrote: post #58

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user u…

I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little crap the user won't care about if it doesn't work as they expect. I end up being the only person saying "If I was the user, I'd expect this. And if I was doing this, I expect this behavior". Instead, they act as if the user has a PhD in cs, and instead, the user for what we are making likely barely graduated high school.

software should be developed in terms of the user, not the developer. Not every one knows every windows/linux command and debugging to fix problems.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#109

Post by FalconSensei »

manigandham wrote: post #90
FalconSensei wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tried to drag and drop and didn't work. Also, if I save to share later, it's not going to work, and I would need to do the same things the author did to make it work. It's not guaranteed that it will work properly (with auto loop) everywhere. And if you consider browsers/extensions might block auto-playing videos in the future... gif just works. Drag and drop anywhere, any browser, any app, and it works. (Ok, almost…

Video as a file usually works, it's the presentation/player part that is entirely dependent on whatever application and OS you're using to view it. Most messaging apps now support video pretty easily so there's some progress being made.

They support video, but, acting as an image?

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#110

Post by joemi »

sp332 wrote: post #33
joemi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gifs (and videos that people call gifs) wouldn’t be what they are today if it weren’t for their ease of copying/saving and pasting/uploading to somewhere else, which you could similarly call an application feature. So this application issue with video (as implemented in this article) is almost certainly what will stop gifs from being replaced.

This only worked properly in Firefox since 2016 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664717 so that's probably not it.

Except it is... The first thing I did when I read the article on my phone was try to save the videos, copy the videos, or copy the links for the videos in the article. I was unable to do any of those actions. I firmly believe that for it to overtake the gif, doing those actions with video on popular phones needs to be as easy (if not easier) than with gifs.
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