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Twitter's GIF hack

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Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#141

Post by freejack »

lotyrin wrote: post #91
Rudism wrote: post #88

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole reason gifs started proliferating on the net because people wanted to share short video loops, but didn't want to embed flash or video which may not load or play correctly in a user's browser? And now we are championing the conversion of those gifs back into video? Seems like a strange round-about way of doing things. I forsee a future where all video clips on the net hav…

Yes, in ancient history, video codecs sucked, browsers sucked, and the only way to play video was through plugins that sucked. Now, all the browsers are pretty good at dealing with video, the codecs are hugely improved (although, there's some headaches with IP) and the plugin is dead. Nobody ever actually wanted gifs. They want short, small videos that are guaranteed to work in their browser and that they can be pret…

In ancient times before plugins, animated gifs or any sort of video, we would painstakingly screen cap individual frames from movie clips and use "push" via CGI to force feed the browser a series of images that gave the illusion of animation. It was just a hi-tech spin on flip cards.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#142

Post by snogglethorpe »

freyr wrote: post #104
blt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think gifs' recent surge in popularity has anything to do with technical issues like browser compatibility. They became popular because of artistic/aesthetic value and web culture. These features all differentiate gifs from 2010-mainstream forms of embedded video like Youtube: - starts playing automatically - loops seamlessly - never has sound - no logos or buttons like "share" and "embed" - no scrubber bar o…

I think your list of features is spot on, but I don't think their mainstream popularity had much to do with artistic expression. I'd include one other big feature: - They are dead simple to save (or link to) and drop into your own page/blog/comment. and claim that GIFs are just really easy to share and view. They've offered a better experience both for post and viewing a short soundless clip than could be provided by…

> They've offered a better experience both for post and viewing a short soundless clip than could be provided by an embedded Youtube player.

I'm not sure that's always true, as there some very noticeable problems with GIFs. Most significantly they're often huge, and must be entirely loaded to play properly, which can result in long delays before they can be viewed (usually with no obvious indication to the viewer) and massive resource usage (besides the problems related to size, animated images also usually don't benefit from the sort of acceleration and optimization that videos do). A page with a bunch of embedded GIFs (not at all uncommon), can completely kill a browser.

[There are other problems, of course, e.g. the complete lack of user control over playback, but the size of GIFs seems to be one of the worst.]

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#143

Post by ObnoxiousJul »

roc wrote: post #96
lotyrin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in ancient history, video codecs sucked, browsers sucked, and the only way to play video was through plugins that sucked. Now, all the browsers are pretty good at dealing with video, the codecs are hugely improved (although, there's some headaches with IP) and the plugin is dead. Nobody ever actually wanted gifs. They want short, small videos that are guaranteed to work in their browser and that they can be pret…

To be fair: they don't want short, small videos any more than they specifically wanted gifs. They want moving images that load quickly. Which has meant short/small/gifs, because most US bandwidth still sucks. And thanks to the mobile explosion it now means short/small/h264. But I bet that as people become used to 5-10x space savings from h264, they'll quickly respond with videos having 5-10x more data. (larger/longer…

well, it loads quickly because contents are provided according to your user agent and black magic with js pinging your nearest best CDN possible near you and with optimal bandwidth, and then, according to a complex choice in a matrix of supported codec(your SW)/compression(CPU)/bandwidth(the net) a video is chosen through painful trial and errors, where every choices in the matrix (growing at the power of 3 and more) is almost made by humans.

The "progress" we could benefits from these new techniques is so complicated and resource greedy and provoking a lock in of customers that I don't think it far outweigh the cost of the poor compression/control of the gif.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#144

Post by alanh »

ars wrote: post #12

This 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 e…

Totally true, ars. I came here to nerd-rage that, no, a GIF is NOT “literally a sequence of idependent images.” That is NOT what makes common video formats use less bandwidth, and I thank you for making this clear.

One thing you can do with video that you can’t do with GIF is programmatically describe motion — shift frame to the left, for example. GIF, you’d have to re-draw it all.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#145

Post by InclinedPlane »

Permit wrote: post #33

I'm curious if anyone is noticed the flickering Loading icon when the .mp4 version loops? It only shows up for 50 ms, but seems kind of annoying. Or maybe it's just my machine? Here's a cap: http://imgur.com/2R84ImD

Weird, could be the way that embedly embeds the video. I don't see the same thing with gfycat.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#147

Post by kalleboo »

protopete wrote: post #30

Unfortunately the MP4 looks worse than the GIF, due to chroma compression in the YUV 420 colorspace. While each pixels luminance value is kept, the color information for a 4-pixel square is stored as a single CrCb pair, which is really obvious when you look at how the orange hat has artifacts against the blue background. Increasing the bitrate won't solve this either, since it's a limitation of the colorspace.

Seeing as how the quality of the source is already completely destroyed by the 256 color gif, I don't think image fidelity really matters that much to the people sharing these...

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#149

Post by nl »

blt wrote: post #97
Rudism wrote: post #88

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole reason gifs started proliferating on the net because people wanted to share short video loops, but didn't want to embed flash or video which may not load or play correctly in a user's browser? And now we are championing the conversion of those gifs back into video? Seems like a strange round-about way of doing things. I forsee a future where all video clips on the net hav…

I don't think gifs' recent surge in popularity has anything to do with technical issues like browser compatibility. They became popular because of artistic/aesthetic value and web culture. These features all differentiate gifs from 2010-mainstream forms of embedded video like Youtube: - starts playing automatically - loops seamlessly - never has sound - no logos or buttons like "share" and "embed" - no scrubber bar o…

And perhaps most important: Many forums (and applications) allow embedding of images, but not videos. That tag works everywhere...
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