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Twitter's GIF hack

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Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#91

Post by lotyrin »

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 pretty sure aren't going to have sound. We can now deliver that.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#92

Post by CountSessine »

mutagen wrote: post #17
stonogo wrote: post #10

This is on a fully-patched RHEL6 workstation: http://i.imgur.com/NleqJTD.png Another example of "use bleeding-edge tech or go fuck yourself" from the modern web.

I suspect some implementation issues rather than a GFY attitude, it doesn't work on FF or Chrome on OSX 10.9. Safari works though.

Chrome on OSX 10.9 works just fine. I'm looking at the example video now.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#93

Post by TD-Linux »

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

I saw it too. The odd thing is that 4chan's equivalent doesn't show any such loading indicator. Also, looping a video in HTML5 doesn't require Javascript.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#94

Post by jgmmo »

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

I saw it everytime the video looped. Left a distinct impression with me that the real GIF version is better.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#95

Post by Kayou »

ferongr wrote: post #69
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.

Or alternatively browsers could use non-terrible chroma upsampling algorithms. http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/79805

Thank you! I was gonna post the exact same thing. Nice website, though.

I encoded the gif in 420 (subsampling), 422 and 444, having a nice quality with 444 with VLC, I embed the three different videos in a web page and when playing in my browser, they are all as bad as the twitter video! I thought that Firefox was using a standard library to play MP4?

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#96

Post by roc »

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…

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/higher-res clips)

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#97

Post by blt »

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 on the bottom
  - repeated instances of the same gif play back in lockstep
  - no frame around it
  - pixel-perfect control
All these features make it possible to create art that wouldn't work with embedded video. (Defining art broadly; captioned movie clips are included.) In the past few years, some creative people started making really good gifs that took advantage of these features. Then the trend spread through web culture. The next generation made gifs because "making gifs is what clever artistic people do on the internet".

It's always been easy to create a looped animation format that combines the feature list above with a better compression scheme. Now that gifs are so popular, someone recognized the need and made one.

IMO, the 256-color dithering was more of a necessary evil for most gif creators, although some took advantage of it. It looks nostalgic on 90s Gourard-shaded untextured computer graphics. But for movie clips, etc, I think many will be glad to get rid of it. I bet we'll see a sect of gif creators who think mp4s are not authentic while most people won't care.

Your last comment reminds me of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" (wiki/youtube). Someone repeats that idea with every lossy medium we invent. I've seen jpeg and vhs examples but I can't find the links right now.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#98

Post by nixme »

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

If you right-click on that, is it a Flash player? Are you on Firefox?

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#99

Post by sillysaurus3 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #77

I made a site that drove this innovation, MediaCrush. It's open source. https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush if you want to try to do this yourself, our code is a good reference. https://mediacru.sh

Why did Gfycat win? I've always wondered.

Re: Twitter's GIF hack

#100

Post by enneff »

mikeash wrote: post #57
enneff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? HTML is older than GIF images. Should we stop accommodating that too?

Huh yourself? HTML dates from 1993, GIF dates from 1987.

Okay, so take my question and s/HTML/hierarchical file systems/ or s/HTML/C/ or make any other substitution. Why ditch something just because it's old?
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