I've never really understood this. I previously had figured that the popularity of GIFs on reddit had been about bandwidth and load times. In that past, video would be too slow for the rapid novelty stimulus reddit offered, while GIFs were lightening. But now every "GIF" people post is a just full movie, and it loads more slowly than YouTube or other websites that are smartly structured to handle video.
It definitely makes sense technically. It should in most cases reduce file size, and also allows you to stream content in buffered so you don't need to wait for the whole thing to load for it to play. (Though I believe streaming in gifs is teeeechnically possible? I feel like I saw a demo one time that made a clock by streaming in gif frames)
Hey thanks, this is super useful! I still don't quite get it though. I understand that converting huge HD GIFs to a standard video format allows steaming and better compression, but why encourage people to upload it like this rather than just upload videos?
The only explanation in the post is "the culture of the GIF now trumps the file format. With Project GIFV, Imgur is reimagining the looping GIF video with all the richness it deserves as a key piece of Internet culture." Is the idea just that people want soundless looping HD video, and they're accustomed to uploading GIFs, so Imgur is going to accommodate them by doing the conversions server-side?
I guess this is an explanation, but it's a surprising one. For instance, it doesn't really fit well with the observation that people uploaded GIFs of content that was obviously native video and not connected to internet GIF culture, e.g., sports videos.
Yes it's all about no sound. Everyone likes opening up a bunch of tabs that include auto-playing funny looping videos, but nobody likes auto-playing sound, especially if it overlaps with some other sound.
I'm not sure if it is Chrome's doing or YouTube's, but if I open a couple of youtube links in tabs (a selection from the "related" list to the right of one I'm currently watching for instance) the clips in the new tabs don't start playing until that tab gains focus. This avoids the auto-playing sound overlapping problem and means you don't miss the start of the clip and drop in part way through. Surely this is the solution to that selection of requirements?
I've noticed the Chrome feature as well. I watch a lot of Twitch streams, and it causes a frustrating experience, albeit with possible workarounds by Twitch. It's that Twitch is about live streams and live chat, but now the video autoplay is delayed until I activate the tab, but chat is still live from the moment I clicked on the link. It basically buffers the stream now, but makes me go out of sync with chat. One alleviator could be Twitch adding a "go live" button that shows up when I'm not live.
There are still two classes of problems unaffected by this change.
1) As is popular with gifs, there could very well be multiple of these autoplaying videos on the same page, probably even multiple fitting in the same viewport area. If they had sound, these would interfere with eachother.
2) My understanding is that many listen to music from some source unrelated to the webpage containing these autoplaying videos. So even if there's only one video, its autoplaying sound could easily mix with my tunes.
Doing autoplaying sound is hard, but with gaze tracking and knowledge of system sound usage status, I think a pretty good solution is possible.
Yea, it is such weird behavior. I can count the number of times I've ever wanted to adjust the volume of the ringer, rather than just turn it on/off, on one hand.
Luckily on newer version of Android there is always an option to quickly access the media volume after you press the volume button once, but it's still unintuitive.
Windows phone nailed this. As you change volume, a panel comes in with two sliders: one media, one ringer, so if you were in the wrong context and changed the wrong volume, you right away have access to the other one. I find (on iOS now) I fiddle with the ringer volume a lot throughout the day. Loudest possible is waaaay too loud for me, unless I’m in a noisy place.
It doesn't have much to do with the gif/jpg formats though, it works with anything. It's just a multipart HTTP response that keeps sending entire new files to replace the previous one. It's not even a jpeg/gif encoding of the differences between frames which would be much more efficient.
Part of the popularity of GIFs is that editing them is easier. You can edit them in photoshop or gimp or other image editors, which allow you to use skills learned for editing images (like putting those large black and white texts on top of an image) with it.
Video require more technical skill and different software people would have to learn (and time in case you need to edit it frame by frame).
What I find nonsensical is that imgur only lets you upload gif which it then converts to video instead of allowing you to upload video directly.
FYI you can edit videos in Photoshop and paint on every individual frame. I used they feature back in 2005? (might be bad memory). In any case just opened an mp4 in Photoshop to make sure I wasn't crazy.
Most gifs these days is via custom tools that will basically rip the frames and assemble the gif. Just give it a start and stop time, a video file, and grab a latte...
In case I don't have a source video file, one of my personal favourites is peek [1]. A small gtk app that allows you to quickly record a portion of your screen and save as a GIF.
The compression MP4 (or any other modern video format) offers is much better than what you can obtain with GIF. MP4s are, perhaps surprisingly, actually the better choice in terms of bandwidth and load time.
Yes, the same HD content is better as MP4 than GIF, but in the past a "typical" GIF loaded much faster than a typical video. It may even be true (any experts?) that there is an effective lower limit on video quality/framerate for MP4 that prevents it from being the super fast novelty juice that a low-quality GIF could be.
GIF is expensive to transport but cheap to decode. Compression that is in a sense more appropriate for video is the other way around. You may blow through a data cap (people still have these) quickly with animated GIFs, but at least you can put a hundred of them on a web page and have them all play. Eventually. If the downloads ever finish.
What he is talking about is that back when gifs and videos were both postage stamps pushed over modems, gifs won out.
But what changed was that people simply started ripping frames from HD videos, dumping them into gifs and plastering them all over social media.
End result was that the gifs ballooned in size because they now held many more images, and each images was much higher resolution.
What is more wacky is why gifs returned to fashion at all. They were dead for nearly a decade after people stopped doing their own web sites, and used gifs for things like animated "under construction" signs.
> What is more wacky is why gifs returned to fashion at all. They were dead for nearly a decade after people stopped doing their own web sites, and used gifs for things like animated "under construction" signs.
Same reason that H.264 won the web video standards war: mobile.
While mobile browsers can now embed videos reliably that wasn't always the case, and if there's one thing mobile users hate it's links opening other apps. GIFs allowed "video" content to be displayed inline easily in a mostly universal fashion.
- Many websites support embedding images in user content but not videos (Gmail, Hangouts, and Stack Overflow, to name a few).
- A "minimum viable animated thing" tag is more complicated for videos:
<video autoplay loop muted src=video.mp4>
- Supporting videos in img tags and sending the right Accept header means that image hosting sites and CDNs can immediately start serving video files to browsers that support them, without the page needing to change. This applies to every hotlinked gif out there.
The UX of short, looping, soundless, autoplaying videos without player controls is popular. This is partially for simplicity and consistency. Gifs have been less efficient than modern compressed video for a long time.
Why do they do this?