
Show HN: Create high resolution GIFs from YouTube - builderone
https://gifrun.com
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SimeVidas
It takes an optimized video file from YouTube and bloats it into a GIF that is
20 times larger.

Why not just mute the video, trim it, and reduce its resolution? GIF needs to
die.

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builderone
GIFs should not be compared to videos, for one GIF is 30 year old technology
with obvious limitations, however, there is still demand due to its
portability. It also creates better effect if its very short clip, which most
GIFs are. I appreciate you checking it out.

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catalogia
What platform doesn't have the ability to play an mp4 file? GNU Icecat on a
FSF approved distro maybe, but beyond that? The portability advantage of gifs
are _greatly_ overstated.

The way I see it, gifs are strictly obsolete. They're big, load slow, and have
limited color support (what's the point of a high-resolution gif if you're
going to trash all the color data anyway?)

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builderone
You made all the right points about GIF, it is an outdated technology for
sure, but nothing has truly replaced it yet, there is apng as well as other
technologies, but that's not universally supported as GIFs are.

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flanbiscuit
Wow that was incredibly easy to use (I made this as a test:
[https://i.imgur.com/7qAVhzn.gif](https://i.imgur.com/7qAVhzn.gif))

1 feature request if possible, can you add another scrubber to the video so
that I can set a beginning and end region and be able to preview my loop
before creating the gif? Not sure how much of your gif making is done on the
front or back-end but if it's back-end it would save you some bandwidth and
CPU.

this is really good! awesome work

~~~
builderone
I'm adding features all the time, I'm thinking of providing a quick preview as
well. I appreciate you checking it out and glad you like it!

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spuz
It looks like the tool creates 8 bit .gif files rather than h264 encoded webm
videos. Is there any demand for actual .gif files these days?

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pixelbath
What part of this project led you to believe it would produce "h264 encoded
webm videos"?

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catalogia
Probably the part where it's 2020, not 1995.

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builderone
This is a GIF maker, so it creates GIFs from videos and nothing more. Due to
the fact that GIFs are over 30 years old, it should not be compared to today's
technology, specially video encoding which is very different from a soundless
looping image. Having said that, I'm all for something new that will replace a
GIF with more modern approach and millions of colors.

~~~
catalogia
> _it should not be compared to today 's technology, specially video encoding
> which is very different from a soundless looping image_

Considering most sites that let users upload gifs convert them into looping
soundless videos, I'd say they're "very different" insofar as they're _very
inferior_.

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stanford89
I would highly suggest to add some simple backend validation! Without even
opening Postman, you can just edit the HTML and request an 8K gif! That's for
sure quite expensive in terms of bandwidth and CPU!

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FraKtus
You can do this with youtube-dl and FFmpeg.

If you create high-resolution GIFs, you will end with huge files, that's
surprising. This is because the compression, after reduction to a 256 color
table, is lossless.

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songshuu
Offhand do you recall the one-liner for that?

I remember seeing it a couple years back.

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philsnow
I often refer to this article, it does a good job of building a one-liner up
from scratch: [https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to-make-gifs-with-
ffmpeg/](https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to-make-gifs-with-ffmpeg/)

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skilled
Not going to lie, this is pretty neat. Before I commit to bookmarking this,
are you going to keep it free? And what exactly are your plans?

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kristoph1
The plan is to keep it free supported by ads.

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skilled
Thanks!

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emilsedgh
This is awesome. Any way you can make an API out of this?

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flanbiscuit
This is not a replacement for someone else conveniently creating an API for
you but if you're interested in running your own version of this you can
probably recreate this with a combination of youtube-dl[1] (Python) and
ffmpeg[2] and build an API around that. Youtube-dl handles A LOT more sites
than just Youtube[3]

1\. [http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html](http://ytdl-
org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html)

2\. [https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to-make-gifs-with-
ffmpeg/](https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to-make-gifs-with-ffmpeg/)

3\. [http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html](http://ytdl-
org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)

I wouldn't be surprised if this site was doing exactly this.

~~~
emilsedgh
Yes unfortunately creating a prototype is one thing but maintenance,
monitoring and long term commitment is another.

Thanks a lot though. youtube-dl and ffmpeg are very handy tools.

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builderone
I use both YouTube-DL and FFMPEG to accomplish this task. I will say this,
creating high quality GIF is by far the easiest part of the whole thing.
Bypassing too many request as well as throttling which youtube is very good at
was the trickiest part and still is. Making something work for a single user
is one thing, scaling so everyone else can use it is a whole different beast.
The name of the game is proxy and everything revolves around that.

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JimWestergren
Exactly what I needed, thanks!

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kristoph1
Glad you like it!

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amelius
I hate to be that guy but is this allowed by YouTube's ToS?

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kristoph1
GIFs ate fair use, it’s not a copyright issues, also not using YouTube api.

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ReactiveJelly
> not using YouTube api

Which means, like youtube-dl, it will break every week or two

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builderone
More like every three weeks, but who's counting :)

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builderone
Also I like to add, I've build number of applications using an API only to
regret the time I spent on it later. When you rely on external API, its really
not your product and you don't own it, API owns you and every move you make.
Instead, I would rather rely on a strong community for support such as
YouTube-DL, even though there are issues and its not perfect, still much
better than API route, just my two cents.

