
Introducing GIFV - crabasa
http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/?forcedesktop=1
======
jawns
"With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a
.gifv extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet
that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the
current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to
submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations
before the end of the year."

This is bizarre. GIFV isn't a new file format. It is just an alias for an
existing format. The only reason the letters "GIF" are in this new file
extension is to signal that the file was converted from a GIF, but who cares,
apart from the so-called cultural connotations?

I mean, does anybody care to have a BMPJ (a JPEG file that was converted from
a BMP) or a WAV3 (an MP3 that was converted from a WAV)? Or a
.GIFMP4GIFMP4GIFMP4 file, which was converted back and forth a few times?

~~~
xpaulbettsx
Browsers should display GIFVs without transport controls (unlike <video>), and
ignore any audio tracks that are included - basically construct a limited MP4
profile and handle it appropriately. It's a useful construct imho.

~~~
bhouston
Why not just have an attribute or two in <video> tag that sets it to be no
volume and whether there should be transport controls? That sounds more useful
to me and applicable across all video formats.

~~~
revscat
If you take a look at the source of the .gifv link from their blog posting it
looks like this is exactly what they are doing:

    
    
        <video height="370" width="660" autoplay="" loop="" muted=""><source type="video/mp4" src="http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.mp4"></video>
    

If you open up zvATqgs.mp4 you are redirected to a .gifv file, which is an
HTML document. It has a video tag that mutes the audio.

edit: This is interesting, though:

    
    
        ~/temp curl -I http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.mp4
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Last-Modified: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 20:44:27 GMT 
        ETag: "2342c1e692a327e61be8395bf4d9109c"
        Content-Type: video/mp4
    

Browsers, however, are redirected to the .gifv link, while curl gets the raw
mp4 file. Interesting. I was expecting a 30x response code.

Further edit: Passing a user agent to curl also causes the raw mp4 file to be
returned, with no redirection. Anyone know how they are doing this redirection
for browsers but not for curl?

~~~
bhouston
They need to get the raw MP4 file eventually so the browser can display it, it
can not always redirect.

~~~
revscat
I understand that, I'm just curious as to the mechanism that they are using.

~~~
SCHiM
I'm not sure, and the server response from your sample certainly does not fit
with this idea, but maybe it's because curl uses http/1.0?

Or is that wget that uses 1.0... Fire up wireshark ;)

Edit:

So it was the useragent and accept header that did it. Nevermind my stupid
idea.

------
wbond
Am I misunderstanding something here? I don't see anything other than an .mp4
video served via a <video> tag from a URL that ends in .gifv. I was interested
in seeing how it worked to look into supporting it for a mime type detection
library I've written.

The blog post mentions submitting a specification to the relevant standards
organization. Are they planning on creating a new mp4 ftyp and registering a
mimetype with IANA?

~~~
chillingeffect
Yes, why are they calling mp4 files gifv files? Is it somehow cooler?

Can I start serving .html files as .awesome files? And .js as .kicka$$ files?
and .mp3 as .boomin'?

GET "index.awesome"

<script src='jquery.kicka$$'>

<audio src="foil.boomin'">

at this rate, why not re-write all of html so it's cooler? <body> => <b0d>
<title> => <1nduk+10n>

<link rel="openid.server" href=""> => <cyb3r-jack
rel=!!openid.matrix_data_cent3r" ultra_max_hyper_ref="">

~~~
personZ
_Can I start serving .html files as .awesome files?_

Sure, go ahead. Extensions in a URL have little to do with the actual type of
content, and .html has long been abandoned by dynamic systems, who originally
went to extensions being an implementation detail, and on many current systems
being a lie (e.g. the .aspx extension that actually runs a PHP page that
returns an HTML5 file).

They're using a URL extension to signal to their system what to do with the
file, which in the case of GIFV is to wrap an MP4 video in a simple HTML5
container. Eh.

~~~
Supermighty
I can't upvote you enough. Too few people realize that the server returned
mimetype actually tells the browser how to handle the content.

~~~
Terretta
Oh how I wish that were true.

It's what's intended, but it's not what's true. Usually this bites on video,
but it even bites on, say, SVG:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10261460/internet-
explore...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10261460/internet-explorer-
ignoring-mime-type)

Ostensibly, this is to protect users. Quoting TechNet:

When files are served to the client, Internet Explorer uses the following
pieces of information to decide how to handle the file:

1\. File name extension, the corresponding ProgID and CLSID for the registered
handler of that file name extension.

2\. Content-Type from the HTTP header (MIME type), the corresponding ProgID,
and CLSID for the registered handler of that Content or MIME type.

3\. Content-Disposition from the HTTP header.

4\. Results of the MIME sniff.

\-- [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc787872(v=ws.10)...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc787872\(v=ws.10\).aspx)

~~~
simoncion
If IE chooses to use file extension over MIME type, then it is broken and
should be ignored.

Yes, I'm aware that this is probably a workaround for broken web servers, or
brain-dead server admins. This workaround should never have been deployed, as
it breaks interactions with non-broken web servers.

~~~
Arnavion
It's not just IE that plays loose like this. Chrome will ignore even the
Content-Type header if it can see the content is an audio or video file. For
example, upload a .wav to puush and open it in FF and Chrome. FF will show a
dump of the bytes interpreted as text because the server sent it with Content-
Type: text/plain. Chrome will show an <audio> element.

You can't call either browser broken here. One is doing what the spec says is
correct. The other is doing what the user says is correct.

------
minimaxir
The "convert-GIF-to-MP4" technique is the same technique that Twitter [1] and
Imgur-competitior Giphy [2] uses.

[1] [http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-
tell...](http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-telling-you-
about-gifs)

[2]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g0791/hey_reddit_were...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g0791/hey_reddit_were_giphy_lets_talk_about_gifs/)

~~~
dublinben
I would say that Gfycat and Mediacru.sh are actually the leading competitors
in this area.

~~~
DontBeADick
Is Mediacru.sh banned from Reddit? I just saw a thread the other day where
someone said the domain was blocked by admins to prevent it from competing
with their preferred service (probably Gfycat).

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
mediacru.sh admin here. We used to be banned, many months ago. I was talking
about our past troubles in that thread.

------
arrakeen
an animated gif is not necessarily a video clip, but it seems that i'm in the
minority these days.

here's a gif by nicolas sassoon, which format would you prefer?

[http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gif](http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gif) (1.3 MB)

or

[http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gifv](http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gifv) (3.9 MB)

~~~
nemo1618
another user brought up a good point in the comments section of the imgur
post:

>GIFs being lossless, editable and universally supported are a pretty big part
of what spawned this “culture of the GIF”.

Sure, video editing tools exist, but I think most people would agree that GIFs
are more "remix-able" than MP4s. It's important that we preserve both formats.
(Or perhaps it's time for a modern lossless animation format?)

~~~
tw04
I think the point is having a proper display option. Most photographers shoot
and edit in RAW, but the final product is almost always displayed as a jpg. I
don't think this is meant to eliminate gif entirely, just limit it to the
areas it belongs, like editing as you pointed out. The only issue I see is
that there needs to be an easy option to download the original pre-converted
file.

~~~
infogulch
But GIF is a terrible intermediate format. It's only 'lossless' in the sense
that there's no advanced compression going on. But since it can only produce
256 colors gifs tend to be _extremely_ lossy for video-like formats, often
producing awful color banding.

Sure, if you're doing things with a very small color palette like pixel art or
software tutorials then the current gif is fine for your needs, but gifs are
increasingly used for video which typically has a huge color range in each
frame, and we need something different for these cases.

------
Mizza
I think this actually in response to Gyfcat, who have been doing this exact
same thing for a while, and eating up quite a lot of imgur's redditshare:
[https://gfycat.com/](https://gfycat.com/)

~~~
hnha
gfycat does "the right thing", they use the free and open webm format.

------
sauere
Can't we just all settle for .webm?

The cancerous patented MP4/H264 combination must die.

~~~
astrodust
WebM is a format nobody asked for and nobody wants.

It's _claimed_ that WebM is patent free, but this is impossible. There's just
too many patents in the video space, any one of which could surface and tank
this format.

Remember GIF itself was, for a while, subject to patent problems.

At least with H264 companies like Cisco are releasing implementations with
indemnity from that ([http://www.openh264.org/](http://www.openh264.org/))
which I think is better than coming up with some wonky new format.

~~~
thristian
As far as I understand it, although there are many patents in the video space,
they are not evenly distributed across all possible approaches and algorithms.
Instead, when the next MPEG/ITC standard begins to crystalize, a bazillion
companies rush to file patents on some specific, small part of the format so
they can join MPEG-LA and get a passive revenue stream.

In particular, if you design a video compression format that deliberately
avoids doing what MPEG4 or H.264 does, your odds of patent infringement go
down drastically.

------
sehugg
No. Just no. These are muted videos, not GIFs.

GIFs have an 8-bit palette. They're lossless. They are meant to be short and
sweet, because they take up a lot of bits.

They're also easy to manipulate, easy to encode/decode (I have a single .java
file which generates animated GIFs) and _unequivocally_ patent-free.

Let us stand up against this subversion of the pure GIF format.
[success_kid.gif]

------
IgorPartola
Anyone try to browse images on Imgur on iOS lately? I have. It's a huge pain
because M4V videos take over the entire screen when they open. This looks
great on a desktop browser where the videos play right on the page, but on iOS
the experience is markedly worse than before. The videos load faster, but
having to tap play, watching it loop, then tapping on the video again to bring
up the header/footer, then tapping Done to stop the video... How is that
better than just tapping Play?

Now, I understand that this is an issue with iOS and not with Imgur, but
honestly, GIFV is not a great improvement, technologically or otherwise.

Also, note that most GIF's on Imgur end up there as screen caps of various web
videos. In other words the process is now M4V -> GIF -> M4V. Instead, Imgur
could just build tools for better short video creation that they could then
host.

------
ssalenik
I don't know if its just me, but the GIFVs embedded on the page dont load for
me, unless I click on them to open them in a page on their own, and the second
one doesn't play even in this case.

Firefox 32.0.3 on Linux

~~~
saidajigumi
That's probably because Firefox on OS X (32.0.3) doesn't yet handle H.264,
which is what these GIFV files really are.

FF on Windows (32.0.2) does support H.264, and the GIFV files play as
expected. IIRC, FF on Android was the first version to get H.264 support,
which it's had for some time now.

EDIT: You can check codec support for your current browser+platform at
YouTube's HTML5 page, below. I briefly dug around in Bugzilla for this issue,
but haven't found it yet.

[https://www.youtube.com/html5](https://www.youtube.com/html5)

~~~
ssalenik
You're right, the page you linked shows that my browser doesn't have support
for H.264... though then I'm confused as to why the first GIFV loads for me
when I open it on a separate page...

------
dublinben
I'm a little disappointed that they've not only created an absurd new file
extension, but that they're settling on patent-encumbered H.264 video
compression.

------
valarauca1
I think bhuston said it best.

>This is a marketing endeavor that is pretending to be a technical innovation.

Most of us are asking, why isn't it format X, or format Y. When they are
clearly superior in quality and compression. The answer is they don't have
marketing power.

GIFV is directed at increasing attention to imgur. By trying to make more
sites adopt it as their image/video hosting platform. Since imgur already has
the size/market dominance to spread the GIFV platform. Increasing its chance
of adoption.

Rise above, support webm. Better compression, better quality, more wide
spread.

~~~
ubercow13
>Better compression, better quality

this isn't true

------
mwfunk
The reason Imgur is doing what they're doing makes sense (downloading animated
GIFs is an absurd waste of bandwidth when people just want to see really short
low-quality videos in their browsers).

The way they're going about it and the way they're marketing the decision is
arguably kinda silly. But the monocle-popping that is occurring in this thread
is an order of magnitude sillier than anything Imgur is doing.

This is really not worthy of the volume or intensity of the hand-wringing that
is occurring in this thread. This is the type of news that you either ignore
completely, or skim, nod, and move on. At worst it deserves some exaggerated
eye rolling or a sarcastic joke to a cow-orker during lunch.

------
com2kid
I cannot right click and save an MP4 video in my browser.

I cannot drag and drop it into an email.

As a regular end user, I can use approved sharing features only. As a
developer, yeah, I can download it myself and rehost it somewhere that
hopefully supports MP4 video.

The historical pissing match over how to best do animated PNG files is sad. An
animated image format that is treated differently from videos is a nice thing
to have.

People have entire folders full of appropriate reaction GIFs. With how MP4
video is treated online today, such a thing is not possble.

~~~
polarix
right click -> save works in chrome canary, 39.0.2163.3 at least.

drag and drop does not, yet, but perhaps with this initiative it will be
prioritized.

~~~
epidemian
Dragging&dropping the video from that page into an email (Gmail) on another
tab worked as expected. Don't know if Gmail is doing something special though.

I tried this on a desktop Firefox/Ubuntu. I'm actually quite surprised that it
worked without any problems, considering the rough history of MP4 on Linux/OSS
in general :D

------
jbk
Why a new extension?

Doesn't mp4 have enough extensions? .aac, .mp4, .m4a, .m4b, .mp4v, .m4p, .m4v,
.mpeg4 so far.

And now .gifv? I don't get it.

~~~
u124556
A new extension everyone can use...
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

------
hmage
To all of you here asking 'why not webm?' consider this -- gfycat serves both
webm and h264, I'm pretty sure imgur will add that in future, so no big deal.
As for support, most of you are sitting on Chrome already, so you won't have
any troubles playing h264.

Cheers.

~~~
gcb0
the good ol SF engineer bubble.

it must be nice to live such a sheltered life.

hint: if you only care about chrome users on every feature, and keep looking
at you site access log to justify, you may find that there is a reason why
your access log mostly have chrome user in the first place...

~~~
aeturnum
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What video codec would you pick, and what
does it have to do with the SF bubble?

P.s. It is nice to live a sheltered life.

------
brokentone
Beyond the webp/m debate that I'm sure will take place here adequately without
my input:

I think one of the bigger concerns these days with "short video clips on the
web" \- which is what we're all trying to solve with whatever technology - is
workflow. People finally understand how to make gifs even if they're super low
quality, or super large, then these poorly compressed "images" are being
converted into various other things. If the tools were there to create audio-
less MP4 / webp/m, that would help a lot.

------
mherdeg
Is this what gfycat does?

~~~
dublinben
That site actually uses the superior VP8 compression format in a WebM
container.

~~~
dallen33
Superior in what sense? Not quality or file size.

~~~
tormeh
Well, it's patents are free to licence and with open source code, so it's
superior in a way that for many (me included) believe trump the others.

------
chtoric
the link is down for me (it says page not found), here is the cached version
from google
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aimgur...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aimgur.com%2Fblog%2F2014%2F10%2F09%2Fintroducing-
gifv%2F)

------
markbao
The marketing here is a little disingenuous ("Imgur is reimagining the looping
GIF video"), and a good number of Imgur users (those that have also used
Gfycat, the intersection of which I presume are relatively dedicated users)
will know it. Not a great move.

------
MBCook
Oh thank god. Finally.

I've been hoping they'd do this for a while. I hate browsing Reddit and
finding a link to a little 'video' that then takes minutes to download fully
and still looks terrible because it's a 15MB gif.

------
jcromartie
Why can't we just deal with video without hiding it behind "GIF"?

~~~
pjc50
GIF seems to have a better UX than video for its particular use case: inline,
control-free, looping, audio-free.

~~~
jcromartie
Video can do that. In fact, video _is_ doing this here.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
As someone who runs a website with something similar, I'm hoping that Imgur is
big enough to push for some open standards around this. I want embedding video
to become as commonplace as embedding GIFs.

------
AmericanOP
Surprised ctrl+f 'mobile' returns only one result..

gifv is broken for mobile. I have to click play, and it runs as a video. That
is not gif UX.

------
3rd3
Why not WebM?

~~~
masklinn
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone)

------
aikah
I dont get the trick.Is it gif or a h264 video inside a "gif" container?
looking at the source code,I see a video tag.

~~~
sbierwagen
It's a video served with the video/mp4 content-type, using the .gifv file
extension.

(Well, actually, the .gifv is just a web page that holds the <video> tags for
the mp4, but...)

------
shittyanalogy
Part of the reason GIFs are so popular is because of the limited colorspace.
The new colorspace and compression sort of turn this into an entirely new
medium not a better GIF. Other than the sometimes better filesize I don't
really understand the appeal of any of this. Especially since support is far
from that of GIF.

------
karl_gluck
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet: why is imgur allowed to use
copyrighted material to promote this new feature? I'm pretty certain they
didn't get permission to use those clips from Tron or Star Wars. Does the fact
that they were created by a user somehow give them immunity?

~~~
bbayer
I think existing copyright law allows this kind of usage. Please refer to
Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use)

~~~
karl_gluck
That's exactly my point -- (editing clarification) that the Copyright Act does
not consider this fair use.

From the article you referenced, "A key consideration is the extent to which
the use is interpreted as <transformative>, as opposed to merely
<derivative>."

These are not parodies, being used for education or being used for critical
analysis of the subject.

~~~
Dylan16807
It doesn't have to be. Parody and education are the situations where you can
pretty much use the entire thing... but they're not using the entire thing.

------
ihaveajob
I clicked on this story hoping to find a clever alternative to the raster path
for traversing images in GIF images, when used to compress video (highly
correlated images). Something that preserves the spirit of GIF, but sucks less
for what kids are using it online these days. Bummer.

------
leafo
I wrote a service in Go to transparently transcode gif to video that you might
be interested in:
[https://github.com/leafo/gifserver](https://github.com/leafo/gifserver)

------
tibiapejagala
What is the innovation here? Four mistakes in spelling 'webm'?

~~~
sb057
Not hardly. This actually uses H.264, which in all regards is inferior to
WebM's VP8.

------
reedlaw
All I get is:

    
    
        Specified "type" attribute of "video/mp4" is not supported. Load of media resource http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.mp4 failed.

------
anonfunction
Right after I finish my mp4 to gif shell script!

[https://github.com/montanaflynn/vidtogif](https://github.com/montanaflynn/vidtogif)

------
doodpants
Great, a format for small embedded animations similar to GIFs, except that
they cannot be stopped using the "Toggle animated GIFs" Firefox extension.

------
zxcvgm
I heard of a HTML5-based alternative some time ago called the "ugoira HTML5
zip player". It uses a ZIP file of PNG/JPG files and renders the animation
using JavaScript onto a <canvas>. There's a detailed slide deck talking about
it [1] and the source code is available too [2].

[1]
[https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/](https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/)

[2] [https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player](https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player)

------
gcb0
imgur manages to be behind even 4chan on featureset and performance... and now
its behind on standards compliance also.

~~~
johnhenry
Hasn't 4chan been doing this with webm for a while?

~~~
gcb0
6months or a year. the owner even did a HN AMA of sorts.

------
opendais
Well, someone is clearly feeling challenged by gfycat, mediacrush, etc. that
did this for year(s).

------
sergiotapia
So this is why Imgur randomly started to output gifs with a .jpg extension.

It broke my autogfy extension. :/

------
GhotiFish
...

I can't see their new format. I can't see mp4's. I'm using firefox.

This is the future? great.

~~~
whoopdedo
It pushes a flash viewer to FF, even though I have a plugin that handles MP4.

------
lucian1900
They also won't look like shit because of the limited colour range.

------
rohan1024
I think animated webp would have been a better choice.

------
higherpurpose
Why didn't they just use webm?

------
skellystudios
Can we all agree to pronounce it 'Jiffy' (gif 'V') and end the gif/gif thing
forever.

------
passwordis
now deal with responsive images/videos

------
chuckreynolds
whoa nice

------
davexunit
Ugh, MP4. Terrible choice.

------
dzhiurgis
I propose a new format - GIFVGIF

------
collypops
I can tell this thread is gonna be a gold mine for Shit HN Says

------
jarnix
Nothing new, it's been shown before by another website.

Plus what the f __* with renaming a .mp4 to a .gifv ? Two extensions for the
same format ?

