

Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif - sgehlich
http://studio.forgif.me

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citricsquid
I really like the interface, it's very clever, only problem I'm having is you
have the 5 second gif limit but that isn't explained anywhere and there's no
indication of how long 5 seconds is on the timeline.

I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey
out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long
have 50% of it grey.

I've used another site for this before (called Gifsoup: <http://gifsoup.com/>)
and they charge about $5/m for the option to make longer gifs with no
watermark, I think this would be something you could offer. I would definitely
convert as I prefer your interface.

edit: The gif quality is pretty terrible, can that be improved?

edit edit: If you click "post to forgif.me" and then have to login and then
login it loses the URL, you have to go back to find it again and click the
button again.

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sgehlich
Thanks for your suggestion, I really appreciate it! The idea of greying the
indicator out is nice, I'll implement it tomorrow.

Yes, we were already thinking about providing such a premium service, we'll
see what we can do. Right now it's just an experiment, let's hope it'll get
bigger :)

Edit: We slice the video into frames by using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, the gif
encoder of ffmpeg uses a pretty bad color palette, I already dived into the
encoder code but didn't manage to improve it. I'll work on it though.

Edit edit: Yup, known issue, gotta fix that today!

~~~
coryl
Cofounder of GifSoup.com here (before we sold it off).

Prepare to have your bandwidth obliterated. You'll need to pay for way better
hosting, people are literally going to hotlink you to death.

I'm not sure if your downloading process has a progress bar, but I suggest you
implement one to keep impatient people from leaving (it looks like you do, but
your server just might be unresponsive at the moment).

Your hosting bill is going to add up quick if you want to keep the service
live and as is, so I suggest you implement a premium service. I don't think
GIFs are a particularly profitable business, but we had fun with it, and its
cool to see our watermarked GIFs on random places like Reddit. Enjoy!

~~~
sgehlich
Hey coryl, thanks for your feedback! The studio is just temporarily storing
the files, they are automatically deleted after (currently) 24h. We will move
this down to 60 minutes though.

As mentioned before, the server this beauty is running on is a very very small
one, since we didn't expect such a huge feedback. We will move to another
server later this week.

I've been running an online video converter for 5 years now, 300 TB of traffic
per month (and the resulting video files are a lot bigger than the .gifs we
are creating with this service), so I guess I'm quite experienced in handling
huge amounts of traffic. As I see the stats on gifsoup.com, it had about 7TB
traffic in total, which I think is nothing to worry about. Thanks for the
hint, though :)

~~~
jacobr
If you would like to save bandwidth anyway, you could make the download link
point to a data uri so that the users can _only_ download the image. Might be
a worse user experience though, if you think it's an OK use case to hotlink
temporarily.

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Hemospectrum
Is the name a recursive apology for its own terrible pun?

~~~
s04p
In that case it would be a great pun, wouldn't it?

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khakimov
Probably will be better to serve static content only by nginx.
<http://forgif.me/assets/132.gif> error from rails.

maybe this will help <http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with-
rails/>

~~~
sgehlich
Right now we don't have that much traffic, so we wouldn't see a big
difference. We will configure nginx precisely when we move to another server,
though.

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ruxkor
Very nice! However, in its current implementation, the service does not seem
to optimize the created gifs at all, i.e. all frames are opaque and do not try
to reuse existing pixels in the last frame(s).

This can be easily changed by using the integrated disposal methods in a gif,
as shown on <http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm> , but
afaik ffmpeg does not support this out of the box.

It seems imagemagick is able to do some basic optimization, as shown on
<http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt> .

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toadburglar
I do like the interface, but in Firefox it's quit unresponsive and clunky, but
a lot smoother in Safari. Either way, it was still quite difficult to actually
find the start and end points I wanted. Not sure if this is something
YouTube's end, like not allowing access to that certain point in the video.

I agree with other(s) when I say the quality is quite terrible, but hopefully
some tweaks with FFMPEG, or maybe even another route.

I do like the neatness and unobtrusive-ness of the watermark though.

I think over all, it shows a lot of promise, but need to fine tune those UI
controls and make it clearer/easier to select a timeframe, and improve the
quality of the GIF somewhat too :)

~~~
sgehlich
Totally agreeing to the points you mentioned. At first we only had like one
timeframe selector, but since videos can be pretty long, we added the zoom
selection (the upper one), but it's quite hard to figure out how to handle
them correctly. Actually you can use it very precisely if you know how.

I guess the first thing I will do is add an instruction video or a short
tutorial to make clear what the controls are there for.

The problem with Firefox is that the videos we are getting from YouTube and
Vimeo are MP4. Since Firefox does not support the h264 codec right now, I had
to implement a flash fallback which is not responsive at all. I wonder why
people still use Firefox, though :P

I'll take some time tomorrow to have a closer look at the gif encoding code of
FFmpeg to make it use another color palette. This is quite complicated though,
so it might take some time. For now, we have to consider ourselves satisfied
with the quality :(

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!

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the-kenny
Works pretty good: <http://forgif.me/gm>

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lmroz
Great tool! Is there a way to add static text?

The 2 usability recommendations I would add are:

1) Tell me how long my video clip is. (Don't make me keep guessing if I am in
the 5 second range).

2) After creating the gif, if I don't like it let me go back to the editing
screen with the last settings I used. I trimmed a youtube video down in the
editor, but when the gif was created a few extra frames seemed to appear in
the final product.

~~~
sgehlich
Yup, static text is one of the features we are planning for this tool.
Currently we round the start and end time (which will be fixed tomorrow) so
you won't get very precise results. Also, a "change settings" button will be
implemented / we will load the given settings if you reopen the editor.

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soufell
shameless plug. 4 months ago I released my own similar app. you can visit it
here. <http://99gifs.com/studio>

Everything is done client side, it uses web workers to render the gif so it
doesn't block the UI and it's fast.

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unkoman
The elements are a bit too small to get accurate results. An indicator for
when the 5 second limit is reached would be appreciated. Also, please indicate
how long I have to wait, it has been splitting video for a long time now.

~~~
sgehlich
Both things will be implemented! Thanks for your feedback!

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enneff
Bug report: I made a gif and halfway through it cut to some other video.
Weird. I couldn't pull any kind of unique identifier out of the page to show
you, sorry.

~~~
sgehlich
Something like this here? <http://forgif.me/hc> I'll have a closer look at it
when I'm at the office, thanks for the hint!

~~~
sgehlich
Should be fixed!

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sgehlich
Sorry, the converter was totally broken for the last few hours. Result:
Totally random .gifs. Fixed that, should work now.

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yotamda
You should post it on Reddit, as it will get lots and lots of usage there.

~~~
sgehlich
Somebody already did, it didn't get a lot of buzz though. Gotta try that later
today!

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braco_alva
I was looking for exactly something like this, really nice interface.

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sgehlich
Thank you :)

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edwinyzh
It'll be great if uploading files are allowed.

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sgehlich
Yup, that's another thing we are planning for the future. Thanks for your
feedback!

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jeffehobbs
Excellent work! Love this.

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dmvaldman
any desire to open source your video UI? it's terrific

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Toshio
How long should it take to split a video, I think it's been 5 minutes already,
and it's still chugging away.

~~~
sgehlich
Yeah the server it's running on is pretty damn slow. We will move to another
server in the next days. Unfortunately we don't show the progress of the video
splitting right now. Try again if it takes to long. Sorry for that!

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Toshio
HN effect already, site down.

~~~
sgehlich
Fixed already, thanks for the comment though :)

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workingbrains
Its very nice application

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arunoda
This is so cool. Hot Videos are so funnly :)

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arunoda
I'm sorry I mean gifs :)

