I kind of feel like .gif's as a format need to die, and this really demonstrates why, in my opinion. this page demonstrates a way to add stop/start abilities to a gif, as well as syncronized audio, which is literally what a video is but without all the ability for compression and support for more than 256 colors.
A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#22Could this be useful to make a better gifsound.com ?
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#23As a developer not familiar with Polymer (until now), I don't know what I was expecting, probably something like polystyrene that would play GIFs.
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#24Nice work. I made GIF Scrubber (http://goo.gl/8vRwr2) which does similar things in a Chrome extension and thought about something you could embed like this but memory and performance became an issue very quickly once I tried larger GIFs. I didn't look at the source but this starts to choke a bit and broke on a few hundred frames. I can tell you people will moan about it even though you're doing wonderful work for free. I would try to avoid some needless issues by putting up a big old disclaimer or something stating this is intended for shorter loops (at the moment). For that purpose which you demo, it looks really slick. Cheers
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#25Gif is the most horrible stuff that happened to the modern web. Wants animation?use the video tag and dont autoplay your sh|t.
You sir, are an idiot.
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#26this is just so cool :D
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#27I kind of feel like .gif's as a format need to die, and this really demonstrates why, in my opinion. this page demonstrates a way to add stop/start abilities to a gif, as well as syncronized audio, which is literally what a video is but without all the ability for compression and support for more than 256 colors.
> which is literally what a video is
People don't really want GIFs; what people want are filesize-limited, auto-playing-but-only-while-visible, auto-looping, and silent-by-default videos. Let's call these "animated images."
The problem is thus: you're designing a piece of forum software, and you're considering whether to allow people to embed various elements in their posts.
There's problems with allowing people to embed arbitrary videos: they can steal bandwidth, slow the browser to a crawl, make sudden noises, play to completion while the tab is in the background, etc.
But if you allow people to embed static images, then there's no additional consideration required in allowing them to embed animated images. Wherever a static image works, an animated one works.
Right now, there are two ways to allow people to embed animated images: either you allow .gif as an image upload format, and then display it without processing--or you allow videos, but do quite a bit of server-side processing (of the kind Vine and Facebook do) to make the result into an animated image.
If there was an adapter format -- some simple file format that:
1. referred to a video by URL (maybe it could be an HTML5 document whose root is a element?), which would then be embedded in place of the metafile;
2. whose media type fell under the image/* hierarchy;
3. and for which the browser would automatically enforce "animated image" semantics,
then that format would be a perfect replacement for GIFs.
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#28Alternatively, ditch GIFs entirely and use bandwidth-friendly and feature-friendly HTML5 video.
Do you know why HTML5 video is not as popular as gif?
Gif is easily copy-pastable, both by content and raw file URL. Thus help its viral spreading
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#29I kind of feel like .gif's as a format need to die, and this really demonstrates why, in my opinion. this page demonstrates a way to add stop/start abilities to a gif, as well as syncronized audio, which is literally what a video is but without all the ability for compression and support for more than 256 colors.
> which is literally what a video is People don't really want GIFs; what people want are filesize-limited, auto-playing-but-only-while-visible, auto-looping, and silent-by-default videos. Let's call these "animated images." The problem is thus: you're designing a piece of forum software, and you're considering whether to allow people to embed various elements in their posts. There's problems with allowing people to e…
All of those criteria are satisfied by a element with the "muted" attribute set, plus a little bit of JS if you want to be able to pause the video when it's scrolled out of view or the user is looking at a different tab.
I don't buy the argument about stealing bandwidth. A 50MB GIF is just as much of a bandwidth leech as a 50MB MP4.
Re: A Polymer element for flexible GIF playback
#30Alternatively, ditch GIFs entirely and use bandwidth-friendly and feature-friendly HTML5 video.
Give me an imgur of silent filesize limited html5 videos.
No, youtube or vine don't cut it, I want to be able to give people a link to a raw file that they will automatically know to be small and silent.