
WebM support on 4chan - ivarious
http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan
======
valarauca1
This is a very big moment for WebM. I feel 4chan has become the 'porn'
industry of the internet. With VHS vs Betamax the largely deciding factor was
which standard porn supported (this was again to a lesser extent with bluray).

The general lack of adoption of animated png's is often pointed squarely on
4chan. Since it generated most of the web's viral funny content. And since
most of it was in .gif, who needs to support .apng?

Hopefully we will see the opposite with WebM. More general funny content, more
drive for it to be adopted on sites like reddit (which already to some extent
uses gifcat on some subs), and imgur. Which will snowball its general
adoption.

~~~
moot
> I feel 4chan has become the 'porn' industry of the internet.

This is the most flattering thing I've ever read about 4chan.

~~~
heydenberk
It's kind of hilarious how much easier it is to summon moot on HN than on,
say, 4chan.

~~~
fosap
HN is pseudonymous, 4chan is mostly anonymous. Probably moot simply isn't a
tripfag.

------
moot
More details here: [http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-
on-4chan](http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan)

~~~
qqueue
What other reasons were there to limit videos to 2 minutes, without audio?
They certainly aren't technical limits.

The commons reasons cited on 4chan are:

1\. All videos with sound would be "screamers", where the audio would get
really loud unexpectedly halfway through, as a simple troll.

2\. 4chan is an _image_ board, not a video board.

3\. the MPAA and other copyright holders would crush 4chan with DCMA takedown
requests for audio.

I feel like (1) could be solved technically with auto-mute and/or a
soundcloud-style visible meter, as well as the novelty eventually wearing off.

For (2), it seems that 4chan's main goal of ephemeral content/anonymity would
overrule the historical precedent for content on the site (and already does,
if /f/ is any indication). If it works for vine/snapchat, why not 4chan?

(3) though seems like the major issue, especially for +2 minute videos.

~~~
tormeh
>as well as the novelty eventually wearing off.

You haven't been on 4chan much, have you? I can promise you it would never get
old. Anyway, what 4chan wants is basically better GIFs.

~~~
qqueue
>what 4chan wants is basically better GIFs.

_And_ sound, as evidenced by anybody who posts links to youtube or soundcloud,
e.g., /a/ or /mu/. Having such functionality directly in 4chan uploads would
further the goal of anonymous ephemerality/content creation better than links
to other sites. I can see your point if by "4chan" you mean "moot and site
admins" due to the copyright concerns, but my feeling from other anons is that
audio support would be awesome overall.

>You haven't been on 4chan much, have you?

If the novelty truly never wore off, every gif would still turn into cheetus
after the first frame, and every link to youtube would still be Rick Astley.

Plus, think of your argument if we already had audio webms for their
legitimate uses and had never known restriction. Would you give up audio on
all webms just because of an occasional "screamer"? Would you give up all
images just because some anons occasionally post shock pictures?

~~~
anon4
> as evidenced by anybody who posts links to youtube or soundcloud

Or people who post images that have audiodata hidden in them in increasingly
sophisticated and hard to detect ways. /v/, /a/ and /mu/ have semi-regular
sounds threads. I'm certain people will find a way to embed sound in video
files in ways that can't be detected and update the media extension to handle
those. We will have sounds one way or another.

------
sprash
WebM is clearly a far inferior experience compared to gif on firefox:

\- at the start there is a stupid "fade in" effect.

\- the loading animation does sometimes not disappear even though the video
has fully loaded.

\- the loading animation is generally annoying. Gifs just stop when bufffering
and continue as soon as there is new data.

\- a useless control bar shows at the bottom on hovering.

\- Unlike gifs the video does not stop when you scroll beyond it which causes
a huge amount of processor load.

~~~
sb057
>\- at the start there is a stupid "fade in" effect.

This is only for non-embedded images. Also, I'm pretty sure this can be
"fixed" with ease.

>\- the loading animation does sometimes not disappear even though the video
has fully loaded.

After viewing hundreds, if not thousands, of WebM files, I have never
experienced this.

>\- the loading animation is generally annoying. Gifs just stop when
bufffering and continue as soon as there is new data.

Again, I have never seen this happen.

>\- a useless control bar shows at the bottom on hovering.

Since when is being able to control playback useless?

>\- Unlike gifs the video does not stop when you scroll beyond it which causes
a huge amount of processor load.

Fair enough, but this will surely be implemented soon enough.

~~~
derf_
> Fair enough, but this will surely be implemented soon enough.

Starting in
<[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=963922>](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=963922>).

------
bstar77
Has anyone had experience optimizing for webm? I really want to support this
codec, but it's insanely slow in my experience. I'm finding that it's
generally around 4x slower than mp4, but I've also had cases where it's taken
up to a minute to encode a file where h264 take under 10 seconds.

My use case is to have the best performance/quality ratio for a 30 second
video under 3mb.

These are my ffmpeg flags:

h264: "-vcodec libx264 -crf 28"

webm: "-c:v libvpx -qmin 0 -qmax 50 -crf 5 -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis -aq 4"

The video I tested with these setting last night took 5 seconds on h264 and 35
seconds for webm, both outputting to a 2.6mb file.

System Specs: \- Intel Core i7 4770 Quad-Core 3.4GHz \- 16gb 1866mhz memory \-
ssd drive \- 64bit ubuntu 12.04 lts

What further frustrates this is that I can use OpenCL to improve encoding
times even more, but only with h264 in ffmpeg (as far as I know).

~~~
gnur
I don't know the details, but how is the quality on both? I can image that
webm takes longer, but if it creates a file that has a higher visual quality
for the same filesize that is great. I think nearly all streaming providers
would take an increase in processing time for a decrease in bandwith, while
quality stays the same..

~~~
ANTSANTS
I'm pretty sure h264 is the superior codec in all regards except for that
pesky license issue. It encodes faster and creates smaller files that look
better. From (lead x264 developer and HN user) DarkShikari[1]:

"Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise.
The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive
quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive
loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or
H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264. Of course, this is still significantly
better than Theora, and in my tests it beats Dirac quite handily as well.

...

Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8
is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate,
description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy
coder..."

I won't pretend to know what all of those terms mean off the top of my head,
but if the lead x264 developer sees absolutely no technical advantage in WebM
vs. h264, that sounds pretty damning to me.

As for why x264 encodes h264 so much faster than ffmpeg or whatever encodes
WebM, the simplest explanation would be that there is much greater demand for
an optimized h264 encoder. WebM has some admittedly large users (Wikimedia
Foundation, Youtube for browsers with no h264 support and no flash player, and
now 4chan), but they're still vanishingly small in comparison to the users of
h264 ("the entire video industry").

[1]
[http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377](http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377)

~~~
threeseed
I think you are underplaying the support of H.264. Almost every single camera
(video or photo), console, handheld device, browser, editing tool, effects
tool, phone, tablet, OS, digital video player, website available today
supports H.264.

People complain about it being closed but actually it is far more open on the
hardware side since each of the big manufacturers are part of the H.264
process.

~~~
ANTSANTS
If I came across as downplaying the adoption of H.264, it wasn't my intent.

Pretty sure Firefox doesn't support H.264 out of the box on Linux, though. I
couldn't wrangle the gstreamer plugin into displaying it either.

------
kalleboo
Any reason to not support h264, which seems to have similar levels of browser
support? (trades Firefox on Linux/OS X/WinVista for support on
IE/Safari/iOS/Android)

~~~
gcb0
Probably he cares about software freedom?

~~~
threeseed
WebM is not free. It is controlled by a single company.

[https://code.google.com/p/webm/source/browse/third_party/goo...](https://code.google.com/p/webm/source/browse/third_party/googletest/src/CONTRIBUTORS?repo=libvpx&r=f89ea3432fd213f0e7c65eceaf6553cb3191306d)

~~~
yohui
First, free software can be developed by one entity, or even one person.

Second, that's a list of contributors to the "Google C++ Testing Framework",
not WebM.

~~~
enneff
Third, the AUTHORS file for libvpx lists people from nVidia, Opera, Broadcom,
and many other non-Googlers.

[https://code.google.com/p/webm/source/browse/AUTHORS?repo=li...](https://code.google.com/p/webm/source/browse/AUTHORS?repo=libvpx)

------
aspensmonster
Awesome! I'm still waiting for other sites like imgur to get with the program
:D

Edit: Thread 2 (Yeah, 4chan, possibly probably nsfw, etc):
[http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/41215438#p41215438](http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/41215438#p41215438)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
[https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh) (I helped make this)

~~~
yohui
There's also [http://gfycat.com](http://gfycat.com), which seems fairly
popular on reddit. And there's [https://vine.co](https://vine.co), too, though
it's aimed at a different niche.

But imgur support would really drive the replacement of GIFs with HTML5 video
mainstream, if/when it arrives.

------
kissickas
OP's link is 404ing and moot's won't connect at all for me. There's no way HN
took down 4chan. Anyone have additional info/a mirror?

~~~
moot
HN mods should probably update the submission URL to this one:
[http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-
on-4chan](http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan)

And you need to disable HTTPS Everywhere for blog.4chan.org since Tumblr
doesn't support HTTPS :(

~~~
ancarda
That link doesn't work either: Firefox can't establish a connection to the
server at blog.4chan.org.

Edit: I just noticed moot's comment about disabling HTTPS Everywhere. The XML
has an exclusion for "status" but not "blog". I'll send a pull request.

~~~
eshyong
The link works for me on Firefox Nightly (yesterday's update).

------
pippy
WebM is a fantastic step forward. I prefer gfycat links over imgur gifs when
browsing reddit (gfycat is a service that converts gifs to WebM). It does have
minor teething problems (controls, loading animations, etc) but its advantages
outweigh its negatives.

WebP however for some reason hasn't gained as much traction as WebM. Firefox
refuses to merge support, despite the fact it leverages the same library is
WebM. I'd like to see WebP gain support more than WebM, Google's mod_speed
converts images to WebM if using the Chrome browser to save on bandwidth.

~~~
bluthru
Gyfycat does not use WebM, it uses mp4:

[http://gfycat.com/about](http://gfycat.com/about)

~~~
exadeci
They have both

[http://gfycat.com/CheapDecisiveChipmunk.webm](http://gfycat.com/CheapDecisiveChipmunk.webm)

[http://gfycat.com/CheapDecisiveChipmunk.mp4](http://gfycat.com/CheapDecisiveChipmunk.mp4)

------
shmerl
One problem I have is that there is no way to set format priority which would
override page order. And because of some Apple's stupid bugs in Safari most
pages list mp4 first. Current Firefox already supports mp4/H.264 through
gstreamer, so it always picks that first even if WebM is available.

I'd prefer to set some option of "free codecs first".

------
X-Istence
Where can I go download a plugin for Safari on OS X?

------
frozenport
It doesn't autoplay.

------
stefantalpalaru
Why not use a <video> tag with the 'loop' attribute to better simulate
animated GIFs?

~~~
modeless
And turn off video controls. They get in the way and lack of them never hurt
gif.

~~~
gillianseed
Hmm... the video controls only appear when I hover above the video, atleast on
the 5 or so webm files I tried on 4chan just now.

