Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#21

Post by NayamAmarshe »

cl3misch wrote: post #9
cornstalks wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they actually GIFs? Some websites use looping videos and call them GIFs, even though they’re H.264 in MP4 or something like that.

webm seems to be the modern replacement for GIFs in browsers. I would suspect gifs.com supports them. Somehow their site is buggy for me atm so I could not test it.

I wish WebM could be the standard. GIFs shouldn't even be used in 2024. It's a format of the past, with no upsides.

I usually only need GIFs for GitHub readmes. GitHub doesn't support WebM autoplay videos.

In texting, Telegram has introduced WebM stickers so there's at least a choice there.

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#22

Post by NayamAmarshe »

dspillett wrote: post #12
NayamAmarshe wrote: post #4

While Gifski is fantastic, I'd really like to know what kind of tech https://gifs.com uses. Their GIFs are really high quality and small in size. I thought they were using Gifski but I'm not sure about it.

Playing with the quality options with Gifski can yield a significant drop in size sometimes without much drop in quality (sometimes no noticeable drop in quality unless you really look). Perhaps gifs.com are using the same (or similar) algorithm with more size-optimised defaults?

I'd like to see if we can extract the details from their GIFs and reproduce it with Gifski.

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#23

Post by edflsafoiewq »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #21
cl3misch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

webm seems to be the modern replacement for GIFs in browsers. I would suspect gifs.com supports them. Somehow their site is buggy for me atm so I could not test it.

I wish WebM could be the standard. GIFs shouldn't even be used in 2024. It's a format of the past, with no upsides. I usually only need GIFs for GitHub readmes. GitHub doesn't support WebM autoplay videos. In texting, Telegram has introduced WebM stickers so there's at least a choice there.

Note that Github does support the slightly better animated WebP... as long as you change the file extension to .gif :)

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#24

Post by latexr »

cornstalks wrote: post #7
NayamAmarshe wrote: post #4

While Gifski is fantastic, I'd really like to know what kind of tech https://gifs.com uses. Their GIFs are really high quality and small in size. I thought they were using Gifski but I'm not sure about it.

Are they actually GIFs? Some websites use looping videos and call them GIFs, even though they’re H.264 in MP4 or something like that.

> Some websites use looping videos and call them GIFs

That’s exactly what they’re doing. Just used the web inspector on one of their GIFs. Imgur does the same thing.

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#25

Post by edflsafoiewq »

cornstalks wrote: post #20
HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are WebM files used? Safari browsers/Apple don't even support it.

They do now. At least on desktop. But it is a more recent feature (within the last few years, I can’t remember when exactly). MP4 with H.264 is still king for compatibility, but WebM with VP9 isn’t as bespoke as it once was.

According to https://caniuse.com/webm, desktop Safari is green since 2022, while iOS Safari is green since two months ago.

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#26

Post by ea016 »

aikinai wrote: post #6

I've used this for years and it's the best out there. Definitely use it for converting videos for Google Slides and such. But it's such a travesty that we're in 2024 and still using GIFs in place of videos. I guess it's not necessary on the web directly anymore, but so many other platforms, like Google, support GIFs but not videos. So we're all stuck encoding into an insanely space/cpu inefficient format just to get…

I think Google Slides supports video, the downside is that you need to upload them to Google Drive first

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#27

Post by jdthedisciple »

sorenjan wrote: post #14

While on the subject of gifs, I'd like to recommend ScreenToGif. As the name suggests it supports screen recording, but the editor is nice for other gifs as well. It's easy to remove duplicate frames, change timing for all or some frames, etc. It can use ffmpeg and gifski for the gif encoding. https://www.screentogif.com/ Also, I just learnt this, gifski has integrated gifsicle for lossy gif compression.

Def has my vouch too, been using it for years.

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#28

Post by c-linkage »

sorenjan wrote: post #14

While on the subject of gifs, I'd like to recommend ScreenToGif. As the name suggests it supports screen recording, but the editor is nice for other gifs as well. It's easy to remove duplicate frames, change timing for all or some frames, etc. It can use ffmpeg and gifski for the gif encoding. https://www.screentogif.com/ Also, I just learnt this, gifski has integrated gifsicle for lossy gif compression.

As others have mentioned below, a lot of sites and applications don't support embedded video, so GIF is the only way to go.

I love using ScreenToGif to embed little videos into my email responses when I'm doing technical support. It's so much easier to show someone the process than describe everything in click by click detail.

I've been doing this for years, and people are always amazed at the videos.

Re: Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder

#29

Post by pornel »

armada651 wrote: post #13
Rperry2174 wrote: post #5

I've tried an absurd amount of video-to-gif tools and Gifski somehow is orders of magnitude better quality than all of them

Gifski does two things that most video-to-gif tools generally don't do: 1. It uses a unique color palette for each frame rather than using one global color palette for all frames. 2. It takes advantage of the fact that pixels from previous frames can be retained and used as part of the next frame even if the colors from those pixels are no longer part of the color palette. This is the main trick gifski uses to get mo…

gifski is also maintaining consistent Floyd-Steinberg dithering across frames (basically dithering in 3 dimensions).

This allows more reuse of the background colors, and keeps file sizes lower by avoiding adding unnecessary temporal noise. Other converters that remap and dither each frame independently will needlessly create unique noise patterns in each frame.

Post reply on HN