
Gfycat - Jiffier gifs through HTML5 video conversion - BeTmAsTeR
http://gfycat.com/about
======
Sir_Cmpwn
Try MediaCrush. It's been on HN a couple times, and it also does the
GIF->HTML5 thing, but it's open-source and has a lot of other benefits, like
browser extensions and a nice API.

[https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh)

Prior discussions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773039)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189397)

Open source:
[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush)

Browser extensions: [https://mediacru.sh/apps](https://mediacru.sh/apps)

API: [https://mediacru.sh/docs](https://mediacru.sh/docs)

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sergiotapia
If someone can create a simple Firefox/Chrome addon that takes imgur .gif
links, and automatically converts the URL from this:

    
    
        http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/666/838/7fb.gif
    

To this:

    
    
        gfycat.com/fetch/http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/666/838/7fb.gif
    

I'm sure it would easily become a top 20 addons hands down.

~~~
imdsm
Extension is now published, though there is no fancy art yet:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autogfy/aleldfepmn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autogfy/aleldfepmngfpemelpfkjcpbnegeliad)

Enjoy!

~~~
bluemetal
This extension works really well.

Feature request: I would like to be able to use some kind of wildcard/regex
system to select which websites or domains it works on.

~~~
imdsm
I will look at this later on.

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w1ntermute
Been using this on reddit for the past couple of weeks, and it works wonders.
It's especially handy on mobile, where bandwidth can be scarce.

But what has really struck me about the mobile experience is that using HTML5
video significantly improves the performance. This is important for
GIFs/videos with a high resolution, which as GIFs would not render in real
time on my phone (which has an S800, so I can only imagine what the experience
must be like on other phones).

~~~
jffry
I imagine it's because your phone has hardware H.264 decoders, while GIF is
being done in CPU.

~~~
fosap
No, every mobile can process a 80ties picture format in tiny resolutions.
90ies computers could do that without a problem without any allocation an
needed only a fraction of their cpu. Now we have quadcore cpus clocked at >1
GHz in our mobiles. It's just the saved bandwidth. And, btw, hardware
allocation is a way overrated. There is a HEVC software implementation for the
iphone. Just compare the complexity of HEVC to GIF.

~~~
bri3d
The problem isn't the peak capability of the hardware: it's the strategy used
to handle the content. In most web browsers animated GIFs are treated as
images, which depending on the browser causes a whole host of potential side-
effects (kept around or animating when offscreen, all frames kept in memory,
etc.)

Video is video and is in general more properly streamed, evicted from memory,
and halted when offscreen.

~~~
teleclimber
Yep.

"... But in the worst case all your elements might be grouped into a single
layer and the browser has to repaint every single element. And, when it’s
done, it still needs to upload everything to the GPU. All of this is work
occurs for every GIF frame..."

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/animated-
gifs/](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/animated-gifs/)

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fiatpandas
Imgur should do something like this when people are viewing gifs at the Imgur
site itself (as opposed to viewing a hotlinked gif file), automatically
replacing the embedded GIF file with a video. I imagine they could save a lot
in bandwidth costs

~~~
corysama
As long a imgur promises to never play audio, I think everyone would be very
happy with that feature.

~~~
derefr
Or just to play audio only on a second level of activation, like Vine does
now.

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barrkel
GIF is a terrible format for video, but OTOH it's fairly lightweight for the
browser for simple animation. Historically, playing video in the browser has
required loading plugins, increasing the attack surface of the browser quite a
bit, as well as inflating memory usage, increasing fragility, etc.

HTML5 video is also blocked by my flash blocker. Up until the latest version
of Firefox, animated gifs were blocked by my use of image.animation_mode:once
in about:config. Providing the element is clickable, the flash blocker makes
it easier to play back the desired video on demand.

~~~
dopamean
Is OTOH really an acronym people are using now?

~~~
AndrewDucker
Earliest usage of the term I can of the term on newsgroups is 1988.

I was certainly using it in the early 90s.

~~~
dopamean
Weird. I've been online since the mid 90's, mostly on IRC and newsgroups, and
have never seen it. TIL.

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simonsays1
That idea originated from [https://mediacru.sh/](https://mediacru.sh/) \- I
read that article and considered doing my own "gfycat" site, it looks like
someone had the motivation to go through with it after all :)

~~~
ShakerBaker
Look at the whois records

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apunic
> The problem is that html5 video doesn't work everywhere (we actually encode
> six different videos to cover the most browsers)

Six different videos?? Anyone knows more about html5 video fragmentation and
why six videos are required?

~~~
jffry
They offer the ability to playback in reverse, so I imagine it's three
different formats, doubled so that there's a reverse copy of each video.

If I had to guess, they're probably encoding MP4/H.264, WebM/VP8, and
Ogg/Theora.

~~~
jc4p
So close:

> Note that there are 6 separate encodings -- mp4, webm, and reduced mp4, for
> forward and reverse

~~~
jffry
That makes sense - looks like WebM/VP8 support in browsers is a superset of
Ogg/Theora support [1]. It would be silly to serve up Ogg/Theora unless it
yielded better quality/bitrate (and I'm not up-to-date on how those two
compare in quality at the same bitrate).

[1]
[http://beta.caniuse.com/#search=video](http://beta.caniuse.com/#search=video)

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jffry
I love the naming scheme (AdjectiveAdjectiveAnimal) you have used, and wonder
whether or not it could hilariously backfire (e.g. the
Scunthorpe/Buttbuttinate problem)

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phoboslab
For a cross browser solution that just needs one video file, supports mobile
browsers and still has a much smaller file size than GIF try jsmpeg:
[http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/05/mpeg1-video-decoder-in-
java...](http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/05/mpeg1-video-decoder-in-javascript)

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kmfrk
This is like the old ImageShack and PhotoBucket days. The most important thing
in deciding between all these competing services is figuring out whose links
will still work five years from now.

I guess the pg question here would be: What happens, if imgur decides they
want in on the action?

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hnov
I cobbled together a similar service [1] a while back, but lost interest since
I figured it wouldn't be profitable. FWIW the tech behind doing something like
this is pretty simple, in my case a small shell script that uses imagemagick
to dump the frames of the GIF as well as its framerate and then pipes into
ffmpeg compiled with x264 and libvpx support.

[1] [http://www.qwikgif.com/](http://www.qwikgif.com/)

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justinph
This is excellent. I've been dealing with weather radar images lately, and
they're all terrible animated gifs. This sizes them down nicely.

A service like this really needs to support oEmbed. The oEmbed spec is pretty
simple and it would make this more widely usable by popular blogging
platforms, and make it easier to use on responsive websites.
[http://oembed.com/](http://oembed.com/)

~~~
leeoniya
> I've been dealing with weather radar images lately, and they're all terrible
> animated gifs

actually, weather radar is an ideal use-case for GIFs. they have limited
colors, only a few dozen frames which may need to be delayed for a few hundred
ms.

you should really try compressing the gifs using something like gifsicle [1],
you'll be astounded by the resulting size (use lzw compression), quality and
performance (use a global color palette). it will surpass any video you can
make.

what GIFs are terrible at is photographs and video. for the majority of
graphics and animations they're awesome sauce.

[1] [http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/](http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/)

~~~
justinph
You're correct: Radar is pretty well suited for a gif. But, it can still lead
to 400kb images that are 150kb when h.264 video. For a mobile connection,
that's worth caring about.

------
zobzu
yes that thanks. gif takes 10x more bandwidth than modern compressed video
average (because generally its lower quality)

so fuck gif, really. ive been annoyed by this for a while. even saw sites that
find it smart to replace flash videos with gif.

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bhuga
Thank god someone is doing this. I'd been looking for a way to dedicate a core
of my laptop to animated gifs.

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kkthrowaw
What format are you converting the GIF to?

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puppetmaster3
The reason for GIF is simple: It autoplays on mobile web reliably.

There is no other reason not to use video.

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tropin
Is there any way of doing this offline for large animated GIF collections?

~~~
aeon10
you could look at the source of mediacrush for this.
[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush)

Edit: It uses ffmpeg

------
est
we badly need a copy pastable video format just like gif. The default html5
video is too video-ish not gif-ish enough.

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tdumitrescu
+1 Go F __* Yourself Cat

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apunic
Handy tool for Reddit users

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VMG
that's one hell of a sample video

other than that: awesome

~~~
Kiro
Are you feeling sorry for the kid or the cat?

~~~
factorizer
Both? The parents (or whoever shot that video) are obvious assholes.

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ShakerBaker
gfycat is awesome!

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almosnow
you guys will be acquired by imgur

