
Show HN: Put “GIF” in front of any YouTube URL and hit enter - RoryGlyphic
https://www.gifyoutube.com/watch?v=ZlOsu870j8E
======
JoshTriplett
Very nice. If this had a simple way to add timed annotations
("#ann=top,10s,18.3s,SomeText" or similar), that'd be absurdly useful.

What technology did you build this with? What do you use to decode videos and
write out gifs?

Here's a useful bookmarklet to apply this to a video:
javascript:location.host="gifyoutube.com"

EDIT: are you getting hammered by traffic right now? Because I tried this on a
15 second video, and it's been processing for ten minutes.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
YES. IDEA #1 IS GREAT. Will be done! Also thank you for the bookmarklet. I'll
PM you about the tech ^_^

As per the edit - yeah a ton of traffic BUT generally right now 98% of GIFs
are making. We have a known problem with vevo and other music videos though
:(. If you post the YT link I can look into it and see if it's a traffic thing
or just one that wouldn't work normally

~~~
RoryGlyphic
I'll email you about tech* woops

~~~
stevoo
Well you are posting at an extremely tech oriented group. I believe i speak
for like 90% here that we all want to hear about the tech* wooops.

Shed some light in how you made everything. This is what interests us mostly.

~~~
superasn
This may not be 100% accurate, but this is one way of doing it:

1) youtube-dl ${video-id} video.avi #download youtube to avi

2) ffmpeg -i video.avi -t 10 out%02d.gif #export avi file to gif frames

3) gifsicle --delay=10 --loop *.gif > anim.gif #makes animated looping gif

------
downandout
Great job with this. Very useful. The only issue I see is that Google may sue
over domain/trademark issues. Facebook has done this to many sites for using
"fb" in their domains. While you're getting lots of attention, you may want to
offer a browser plugin/extension/bookmarklet that interfaces with the site
(have the bookmarklet use a domain less likely to be contested) so that you
can keep momentum going if they happen to take your domain.

~~~
iopq
How about let me google it for you?

~~~
iopq
Correction: let me google that for you

[http://lmgtfy.com/](http://lmgtfy.com/)

~~~
tanderson92
Thanks, I couldn't think of a way to find the address of that site.

~~~
georgemcbay
I'm sure it must be listed in the Yahoo Directory somewhere.

[https://dir.yahoo.com/](https://dir.yahoo.com/)

------
NamTaf
The presentation of the page ("copy pasta z", the fullscreen gif background,
the popup in the middle, the banner in the top left) all strike me as being
dodgy/malicious and from a site that I'd immediately want to close and never
visit again.

I'm not sure why you see the need to be so 'internet' with it all when you
could do a fully functional equivalent that would be easier on your servers
too. Just make it clean and usable and it'll be far better.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Hey Nam! Really appreciate the comment.

We were just being silly and hacking away at it adding random things that made
us lol hahaha.

You're right though. Moving forward minimalist is what we hope to accomplish.

Thanks for the feedback ^_^

~~~
heyadayo
I like the design, all the way down to Copy Past Z. I think grandparent post
is out of touch with your target demographic :D

~~~
NamTaf
On the flipside, I think the target demographic would use it without a second
thought regardless of the design because the thing they're after is the end
result. They only look at this site for fleeting seconds to develop their gif.
Essentially, you're trying to appeal to an already sure audience, and in doing
so risk losing out on the 'maybe' audience.

I cannot think of a target demographic who would use the site in its current
incarnation but would not if it were a cleaner, simpler, "less /b/-inspired"
design. I can however think of a demographic who _wouldn 't_ use the site
unless it were cleaner.

edit: This sounds like A/B testing 101 to me.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Thank you for the insightful comment Nam ^_^. Will do some AB testing

------
lotharbot
As an amateur sportswriter, I expect to be using this a LOT during the
upcoming season -- provided there aren't any legal issues with the youtube
name, copyright on clips, etc.

Took like 15 seconds to make
[http://share.gifyoutube.com/lcD.gif](http://share.gifyoutube.com/lcD.gif) (a
game-winning shot from a couple seasons back).

~~~
chatmasta
Shouldn't you be more worried about legal issues of turning a copyrighted
broadcast, possibly not even uploaded by the content owner, into a gif?

~~~
lotharbot
My blog is officially part of one of the content owners' networks. Plus
there's the whole "fair use doctrine" that generally allows small snippets for
commentary purposes.

~~~
im3w1l
I've never heard of these networks, mind explaining how it works?

~~~
lotharbot
Here's the wikipedia entry:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueHoop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueHoop)
(we're a part of ESPN.)

~~~
RoryGlyphic
mmm I love truehoop

------
robszumski
Really great idea. A little feedback: the huge animating background is really
distracting. It also doesn't play well with click-to-play flash blockers.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
I'm sorry :(. That was totally me. I made sadsquidward.com and
riddlydiddly.com a little while ago and just was obsessed with GIFs ahaha.

Will definitely change in the next update. I was thinking maybe a very small
change just for the lols- like a cloud just drifting by

~~~
JoshTriplett
Regarding the latter: please provide alternate content (at least a notice) for
your <object> tags, for people who don't have flash. If nothing else, you
might provide a <video> version, if the content is not interactive. (Then
again, if the content is not interactive, you might as well _only_ have a
<video> version.)

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Thank you JT :D

------
fragmede
Yes, someone else gets it - keep it simple!

I made quietyoutube.com (put 'quiet' in front of any youtube video) and get a
page of _just_ the video, nothing else. I made it a couple years arg. Shame I
can't get the SSL cert, though the bookmarklet I made works well enough.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Mwahaha TYTY :D

------
mesozoic
I love it. You should probably get another domain though for the imminent C&D

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Definitely :3. Any suggestions?

~~~
JoshTriplett
A few names still available:

mkgif.com

gifjam.com

gifit.org

gifr.info

gifry.net

yougif.net or .org

Also, you can still keep your url-based usability with a name like this.
Instead of telling people "just add gif to the beginning of the domain", tell
them "just add .gifjam.com to the end of the domain". Bonus: you can then
easily extend to other video sites.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Thank you JT <3\. You've been a great help

------
valarauca1
This is really cool. And I hate to be _that_ guy, especially so early. But
wouldn't it be easier on both networking and cpu to convert it to a webm?

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Absolutely! We actually made a webm version (that's the smallest size to date
and the fastest to create), but just wanted to perfect GIF creation and get
some captions on the system early before introducing webm.

Maybe we should reverse that?

~~~
jdiez17
If you want to convert GIFs to WebM/MP4/etc you might want to check out the
MediaCrush[1] code. Or just use [https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh),
which is and always will be free.

[1]:
[https://github.com/mediacrush/mediacrush](https://github.com/mediacrush/mediacrush)

~~~
cbhl
I'd love to know your thoughts on using WebP (image format that supports
animation) versus WebM (video format) for GIFs.

Do you think it's worthwhile? If not, why?

~~~
jdiez17
We haven't looked much into WebP as an animation container. And since it's
only supported by Chrome (and will likely remain that way) we are not
currently considering it. WebM and MP4 both have pretty good codecs for video;
definitely a lot better than GIFs, that's for sure.

------
georgemcbay
This is nice work, but I'll go ahead and be the token negative nancy HN poster
and say:

Fuck GIF; just because the patent expired doesn't mean we should use this
piece of shit (by modern standards) format for things it was never really
intended for and for which there are far better solutions, like just linking
to the actual video.

------
Shorel
Now I only need to send that link to
[http://www.gfycat.com/](http://www.gfycat.com/) for it to load fast.

Full circle!

~~~
nikolak
Or you could just use gfycat to create both gif and webm versions (up to 15
sec long) directly from youtube, vimeo etc.

------
lelandbatey
Wow, talk about a really small world! OP (RoryGlyphic) are you the guy who
sent me a text message asking if I'd want to get involved with making a
YouTube-to-Gif site (specifically, _this conversation_ [0]). If so, I wanted
to say good job on finishing your project, it works great and is easy to use
(an much less hackish than my original GifMachine[1]).

Also, I'm super excited that something I made a long time ago prompted someone
else to make something waaaaay more awesome.

Question, you asked about using Gunicorn in our conversation, is this written
in Python or is it written using something else? I'm really curious about the
technologies you use to make this work!

Also of note, why do you ask for a title? I don't see it on the resulting gif
page: [https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/lP1](https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/lP1)

[0] - [http://i.imgur.com/KVl7beK.png](http://i.imgur.com/KVl7beK.png)

[1] - [http://gifmachine.xwl.me/](http://gifmachine.xwl.me/)

~~~
RoryGlyphic
HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH OMGGGGG!!!!!! THIS IS HILARIOUS HAHAHAHAHAH.

Damn this is actually great. We messaged a few people asking to help cut times
(which was my biggest pet peeve). No one ever came through :').

For the title, it's just something we're testing out. I love scrolling through
the DB etc, and a title makes me laugh ahaha. Maybe we can use it in a future
thing?

I'm gonna text you ^_^

------
xccx
This looks great!! Thanks. Coub.com has great ui for user selecting precise
in/out points.
[http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=WThZsGOVkbk&p=n#/458;464](http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=WThZsGOVkbk&p=n#/458;464)
lets you select LOOP in/out right in URL. But neither make GIF, so easy to cut
and paste.

Feature request: please enable preview of youtube loop right in your url like
gifyoutube.com/y0ut0oo0biD&loop=123.4;5.67 where first number is 'start time'
then second number is 'length'. And allow millisecond specification.

File size could be smaller? EG 0.14 second frames instead of 0.08, longer
duration frames aren't too noticable and may cut bulky GIF sizes almost in
half.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
I love the feature request! We'll definitely try to implement this (maybe
after captions?)

File size is something we want to do as well. Working with smallest webm
available, but still want the gif size to be smaller

------
gus_massa
I like that you can choose the starting time directly in the video. But I'd
like to choose the finishing time in the video too. (I wouldn't remove the
option to choose starting point+lenght).

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree and something we were trying to
work on.

One thing that's difficult is choosing the finishing time on the video. For
example if it's 5 seconds or something, the two end points are really close.

What do you think about beta.gifyoutube.com? It's a little different mechanics
for choosing start time (which I'm not the best fan of), but maybe it's a
little easier for end time.

I'm actually not really sure on this. We were going to try some A|B testing
but the beta GYT isn't 100% ready

~~~
shaunol
I like this interface over the current one. The only issue I had with it is
not having millisecond steps to create a decent loop. I also wasn't getting a
thumbnail preview in the black box when seeking the video.

Nice useful tool.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Yeah thumnail thing we have to work on. Thank you ^_^ appreciate the comment

------
leni536
Maybe it would be a good idea (or not) to use javascript to ease on server
side CPU usage:

[https://bgrins.github.io/videoconverter.js](https://bgrins.github.io/videoconverter.js)

It's quite bruteforce and it is a really large javascript file, however you
could leave out all the unneeded codecs for reducing the size. Also you could
first preprocess the video on server side (clipping the time interval, maybe
resizing) and only leave the gif encoding to the client.

------
scrollaway
Are you willing to add a way to easily export to Mediacrush
([https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh))? Would be super useful.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Yes definitely. I think the founder of Mediacru.sh posted below - will email
him in the coming days :D

------
jonathanmarvens
[http://gifyoutube.com/gif/sDY](http://gifyoutube.com/gif/sDY) ← My favorite
GIF right now.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Love it

------
bkd
My videos get stretched from 4x3 to 16:9 (they're stuff I've transferred from
film). Example: TcoLoIcxCRg

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Hmmmmm...it's something you'd rather maintain as 4x3 right?

~~~
bkd
Not necessarily - just something I wanted to mention.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
will look into seeing if any quality is lost ^_^. cheers

~~~
georgemcbay
Displaying a video or photo in an incorrect aspect ratio is unequivocally a
loss of quality.

------
personlurking
Really cool!

One issue I see is when someone uses the same word as title, no one else can
use it (as opposed to a number-based titling system where no one would care if
/90289432 was in use). Also someone else can peruse other people's gifs by
just checking random titles (perhaps a non-issue, though).

~~~
RoryGlyphic
HMMM. Can you describe the first issue again please? Also sorry for the late
response. Not too good at seeing the responses

------
mattl
This is neat but putting it in front of the URL gives me:

GIF[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)

Which doesn't work. I am amazed that Google hasn't complained about the
gifyoutube.com domain.

------
archon810
Looks like it's getting crushed with traffic, so I can't even check it out.

But one key feature for me would be the ability to add text to various
frames/time ranges. That would make creating GIFs that actually say stuff you
can read much easier.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
HMMM. Still working for me :O. Maybe a video that won't be GIF'd?
(vevo/music). Sometimes it does stop people though :O.

The text thing was going to be our next update mwahahahhaha. Great idea thank
you

------
lnanek2
Worked good...I'm amazed it hasn't been crashed from being top on Hacker News
Oo It mentioned queueing work and things like that, must be impressively well
written to not just try every request at once and hose itself.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Ahaha thank you thank you. We ended up being the most upvoted thing on imgur
one day ( [http://imgur.com/gallery/vSDlg](http://imgur.com/gallery/vSDlg) ),
and we learned a lot of lessons after crashing a lot ahahaha:')

I'm actually surprised now too :O

------
cjrd
Excellent job! I love url hacking =). I still frequently type "repeat" after
"youtube" in order to loop songs, but I probably wouldn't bother to cut and
paste the url into a third party site.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
One of the inspirations :')

~~~
JoshTriplett
Along those same lines, if you feel like doing some related hackery, I'd love
to see a youtube video (and audio) reverser. Sometimes people stick reversed
audio in their videos, and I'd like to hear it played back the right way
around; right now, I do that via youtube-dl and audacity, which is a pain. As
far as I can tell, there aren't any reverse video players around at all.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
hmmm....that would be really interesting. What type of use do you see for it?
I think it'd be neat too :O

------
mwhite
There seems to be a bug where if you try to create a gif at the same starting
point but with a different length than one you've already created for the same
video, it only ever returns the original length gif.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Hm. Can you post an example please. Want to solve this ASAP.

------
judk
[http://makeagif.com/youtube-to-gif](http://makeagif.com/youtube-to-gif)

Surface UI really does make all the difference.

Interestingly, makeagif also has trouble with vevo vids.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
The founder of makeagif is nice :D

Trouble with vevo vids is in the DL. Vevo does some funky stuff :[

------
midhir
So cool, congratulations! I made this in a few seconds -
[http://share.gifyoutube.com/lin.gif](http://share.gifyoutube.com/lin.gif)

~~~
RoryGlyphic
wait until you can add captions ahaha I'm already thinking of a few good ones
for this gif

~~~
zenojevski
What about music?

[http://phatgifs.com/?v=http%3A%2F%2Fshare.gifyoutube.com%2Fl...](http://phatgifs.com/?v=http%3A%2F%2Fshare.gifyoutube.com%2Flin.gif&s=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTeKG_KfGTcA&cue=32)

This seems a perfect match for my audio/video mashupper! It could accept
YouTube as video source, but despite my efforts, often gifs still sync better
than youtube's quirky player as they are converted to webm automatically.

------
michaelq
This is awesome. Less than a minute to create this:
[https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/kWm](https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/kWm)

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Mwaha I love it. What's really cool is clicking the View on Youtube button to
go back to the source video ^_^

------
dpweb
In case typing "gif" is too much work for you. A Chrome extension..
[http://goo.gl/BnRKuN](http://goo.gl/BnRKuN)

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Haven't downloaded yet, but can't wait to!

------
mac1175
I had the SAME idea after seeing not-so-good options out there. Great job! I
am interested on how you did this. The conversion speed is really quick!

~~~
RoryGlyphic
tytyty <3

------
im3w1l
Cool idea, interface looks nice, but I never actually managed to convert
anything. I guess it's because the server is hammered right now.

------
lectrick
Now we just need something like this for gfycat.

------
TallboyOne
[http://share.gifyoutube.com/l44.gif](http://share.gifyoutube.com/l44.gif)

------
seanewest
Awesome idea.

[https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/qrh](https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/qrh)

------
brianzelip
RoryGlyphic thanks for seeing "the need to be so 'internet'"!

------
hellbanner
Doesn't load in the same time I watched a 3min video on Vimeo

------
mkoryak
always feel a bit weird when I view the source and find things like this:

<font color="#AAAAAA">/watch?v=QgaTQ5-XfMM</font>

how does one go about deciding to use such markup?

~~~
RoryGlyphic
ahahah we kind of just hacked this together for fun. Legacy code, snippets,
and just being silly :#

~~~
mkoryak
Yes, I could tell by the massive amounts of inline css that either this was a
hack, or you ran it through mailgun's css inliner.

But seriously, if I wanted to add an html tag from 1996 to my site, where is
the best place to look for one on the world wide web?

------
floodcow
This is great! Reddit/4chan and what not is gonna abuse the service.

:)

~~~
RoryGlyphic
it was supposed to be a gift for reddit :')

------
leke
This is wonderful.

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Thank you :D

------
notastartup
Really cool but wonder how youtube's legal department will react to having
youtube in the domain name let alone copyright claims.

What are you using for the queue?

~~~
RoryGlyphic
Plan was to get a different domain (suggestions?) and fwd it but still have
the GYT functionality

I'm not 100% sure if youtube minds. Someone from youtube actually put it on
one of their videos (a button for it), and then said youtube community
department were having fun and spreading it around

We don't use a 3rd party queueing software ^_^.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>suggestions?

Maybe giftube.com or yougif.com?

I'd register those but keep what you currently have for now. Being able to say
"put the word gif in front of any youtube url" is just great for user
experience.

~~~
ada1981
I'd keep the URL functional as a redirect but change the brand...

We will give you a free premium listing on BootName.com if you want community
support to find a name.

------
innguest
Really good idea and well executed. Would you mind saying a few words behind
the code?

Do you scrape the whole video, or just the part requested? And is the
conversion to gif a library or something you wrote?

I'm totally ignorant when it comes to scraping videos and converting them, but
I find it interesting.

~~~
swah
I'm also interested in how you're doing this. I also wanted to do youtube
previews for a website and this seems strictly superior to the thumbnails they
offer :)

Also, why don't you throw Adsense on this page?

------
chenster
+1 simplicity!

~~~
RoryGlyphic
tyty :D

------
frickentrevor
Seriously what is up with the emotions? You use quite a bit of them.

EDIT: The emoticons in your comment replys

~~~
RoryGlyphic
maaaaan what can I say. Gifs are worth 100x emoticons. But if I can't post
gifs, gotta use emoticons

