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
Thanks! On that note, you'll want to handle fractional seconds for the annotations, or possibly frame numbers.
> I'll PM you about the tech ^_^
I look forward to it.
> 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
I don't know what you normally use to download videos, but you might try youtube-dl; it seems to work on just about everything, and you could script it.
hahahahahahhaha. Yeee. I also love emoticons. We actually started out with a gif messenger (glyphic) because we loved texting with emoticons/gifs so much.
The exif comment of the resulting gif file is 'Lavc54.59.100'. So it's most likely ffmpeg/libav or a tool that utilizes their libraries, such as mplayer. It's fairly simple to produce a GIF from a video file using the ffmpeg cli.
Since gifyoutube doesn't support https, this is an updated bookmarklet for thost who use youtube with https and need to change the protocol along with the host:
Yes, we all got that. But the reason why doing so would break gifyoutube would have been because gifyoutube didn't support HTTPS. Which is why the former commenter noted that gifyoutube does support SSL.
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.
I wouldn't bet on it. http://pwnyoutube.com has been around for quite a while now. Although if I remember it right, youtube blocked some IPs associated with tools that let you download/convert videos, as these services violate the terms of use.
Btw: I find it nice that this tool supports https. pwnyoutube.com requires you to remove it manually, which makes it so much more inconvenient to use.
The cases I'm familiar with were 1) clones of Facebook and 2) using "book" in their name. They were more obviously trying to be Facebook. Being a thing for Facebook (YouTube, etc.) is usually handled differently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
It depends, who is your actual target audience? If it's a general anyone and everyone, gif is the way to go. If it's a more technical audience, who probably know what webm already is, then webm may make more sense
And from a more marketing side of things
If you went gif first and five months down the line announcing support for webm makes you look innovative and will probably get you posted to a handful of subreddits and the front page of hn.
If you went webm first and five months down the line announce gif support, you probably won't be able to achieve the same results.
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, which is and always will be free.
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.
Thank you for using MediaCrush! We publish regular transparency reports[1] about several things, including our finances. We don't have any seed money, it's just coming out of our own wallet.
If you'd like to set up a recurring donation, then yes, Gittip is the easiest way to do it. That said, we're not picky about donations; we'll accept pretty much every payment method or barter.
Another mediacrush guy here - jdiez went to sleep. Us devs hang out in #mediacrush on irc.freenode.net and we also read emails sent to {jdiez,drew}@mediacru.sh
I just call those two SafarIE. Safari is shaping up to be the new IE so we might as well just say them in one phrase instead of always specifying them both.
Some email clients support animated gifs embedded in the main email content. None that I currently use, but I do remember it as a feature in Outlook 2003.
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.
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!
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?
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 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.
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).
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
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.
I couldn't test it because the video didn't load. I saw the beta UI once (two slice bars), but when I reloaded, the video didn't appear. (I tested IE11 and Chrome)
Another small UI complain. If I type in the text box the YouTube address and I hit the enter key, it doesn't get to the edit page. I have to reach for my mouse, and click in the green "Create Gif" button.
I think the advantage of choosing your endpoint is it allows finer grained control over what gets rendered in the GIF
you could argue that if you really cared you'd just use a GIF editor to "trim" the final result to your liking, but would be nice not to have this step.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Ahaha thank you thank you. We ended up being the most upvoted thing on imgur one day ( http://imgur.com/gallery/vSDlg ), and we learned a lot of lessons after crashing a lot ahahaha:')
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Someone from youtube != Google's legal department, which makes this situation both awesome and sad. If Google wishes to maintain their ownership of the youtube trademark, legally they must enforce their ownership of it (which means either granting you a license, or sending you a C&D). That said, I'd search around for trademark licensing info - they may have an existing license which covers this use.
In the mean time you may be able to protect yourself a little by adding some text that says that YouTube is a legally registered trademark of Google, Inc., and this site is not affiliated with Google in any way.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems one could easily argue that an "idiot in a hurry" might confuse this for youtube. Which is sort of what the threshold is for this sort of thing nowadays. So, yea, start thinking about a domain that doesn't include youtube
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 :)
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.