21–30 of 31 posts
>GIFS are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are important: >They do not belong to anyone. This may be true now, but for the majority of its lifetime GIF did not belong to everyone, due to Unisys's patent on LZW.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also: video is harder to share and is typically recompressed on every upload, reducing quality. This is such a terrible standard. Using FFprobe, one should be able to determine a video's fitness for universal playback on HTML5 streaming technologies. Automating this process is easy. I've built several high-volume media processing automation platforms for video, and never has this been a challenge for me. Could you…
Maybe people like you should do some evangelizing of these techniques.
I have always run under the assumption that sites like YouTube want to further compress all video uploads so that they can implement proprietary functionality dealing with the video content and its other important business services (ad sales, user agent scraping, data collection, etc.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression I suppose I'm being quite negative, but I don't see the logic in that statement. In what way does it allow more freedom? The biggest advantage I think gif has at the moment is familiarity.
Because you can open any GIF in GIMP and edit it. Pixel by pixel. With videos you got what... Cinelerra? Blender? Try to get a normal person to use these.
Over 60 MB of GIFs on that page according to DevTools. The Fight Club GIF alone is 9 MB. It's a terribly inefficient format, but I think a lack of free and open video formats (and editing software) is partly to blame for its meteoric rise. Also: video is harder to share and is typically recompressed on every upload, reducing quality.
GIF isn't a free and open video format either. The LZW algorithm used to compress them was patented in the 80s and didn't expire in most jurisdictions until 2003-2004.
If we want to see more efficient unencumbered video coding methods used online, the answer is most likely is going to have to come from patent reform (making patent lifetimes shorter).
The situation with H.264 isn't ideal if you're looking for purity, but licensed decoders are pretty readily available (most phones have at least one hardware decoder for it; Google/Microsoft/Apple pay to license the patents for Chrome/Windows (IE)/OS X (Safari); Cisco pays the license the patents for its binaries too).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe people like you should do some evangelizing of these techniques.
I would love to! But I cannot imagine what I can say that would be unique. If people wanted to determine if a video were able to run universally on HTML5 streaming software, wouldn't they just use FFprobe and check the necessary stream metadata for compatibility upon output? Surely, these sites are using FFprobe already to determine other metadata within the video container files they receive from users? I have alway…
It doesn't have to be unique - when evangelizing anything redundant repetition in a myriad of different ways is most important. You never know what will produce the light bulb moment in people. A video, a talk, a Github gist, a blog entry, a Stackoverflow answer, a Slideshare, a Hacker News comment that sparks curiosity..
>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Over 60 MB of GIFs on that page according to DevTools. The Fight Club GIF alone is 9 MB. It's a terribly inefficient format, but I think a lack of free and open video formats (and editing software) is partly to blame for its meteoric rise. Also: video is harder to share and is typically recompressed on every upload, reducing quality.
GIFs are so stupidly easy to use and distribute that I sometimes can’t wrap my head around how convenient the format is. A while ago, I tried to be a good nerd and convert some GIFs to HTML5 video, and I crashed and burned pretty hard: https://ndarville.com/asides/webvideo/ . I gained a new appreciation of GIFs that day. That said, it would be great if we got a compromise where browsers can load only the first frame…
Wouldn't a better compromise be to support MP4/WebM videos in the IMG tag? Videos embedded this way could play without audio by default (just like GIFs).
>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Except videos carry along with them the presumption of audio content.
>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
How exactly do you view a Webm on an iPhone?