8 ms·

Apple releases a bit of code to let you put Live Photos on your sites

112 points by jackgavigan 9y ago

pedalpete 9y ago
Could this be a sign that Apple is beginning to 'get' web services? Their new maps in 3d is industry leading, but is missing a web api, and you still need an AppleId to view it.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Apple 'gets' web services. They run some of the largest web services platforms in the world i.e. iCloud, Messages, iTunes Store, Apple Online Store. They just choose not to release an advertising supported Maps platform because (a) advertising goes against their strong privacy/security message and (b) it doesn't offer anything unique or valuable to the market. To be honest I don't think they would've even gone into Maps if Google hadn't played hard ball during the iPhone 1 days.
  - berberous 9y ago
    None of that is the web though. Why can't the open up Apple Maps and the App Store so you can browse it on a laptop (and initiate remote app installs like with Google Play)? That has nothing to do with ads.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      What are you talking about ? iCloud, iTunes Store and Apple Online Store all have public facing web sites. And web services does not mean web sites. It means having APIs exposed (internally or externally) over web protocols i.e. HTTP which they all do. And you can use Apple Maps on a laptop. Just that it has to be a Mac.
      - kaishiro 9y ago
        While I'm not interested in getting into a semantic argument around something arbitrary like what "getting the web" means, unless I'm missing something (which is absolutely possible!) I don't think it's fair to compare the Apple App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/ios/id36?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/ios/id36?mt=8) to the Google Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps?hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps?hl=en). One of these is clearly baked for the web, and one of these is not. Also, as an aside, if I have missed something and there is a better app store experience for Apple please let me know - I just chose the top result searching for "Apple App Store".
        narrowrail 9y ago
        Apple optimizes their app stores for devices that are able to actually install these apps. I don't think it's as convoluted as you seem to think it is. I have one Apple device (MBA) and I have never agreed to the iTunes TOS and never opened it. I have no interest in the App Store except when nagged for updates. Homebrew and SSH to my linux desktop fulfill my needs, and after 4+ years I get ~6hrs battery life. The web has really gone down hill, and one thing I actually like about Apple is they embrace more of the internet than just the web/advertising.
        kaishiro 9y ago
        "Apple optimizes their app stores for devices that are able to actually install these apps." Right, yes, we agree on that. And I don't find anything at all convoluted about it, I'm not sure why you would think that - there is nothing particularly complex about any of this. My only point is that, in my personal opinion, it's a far nicer experience to explore apps for potential install on an Android phone, via the play store website, then it is for an Apple phone, via this...listing page - when you're not on the device itself. It's possible I'm simply in the minority here but when I'm chilling on the couch thinking I need a new (insert application here), I'd rather use the screen with more real estate. Re: your battery life...cool?
        9y ago
    - derefr 9y ago
      What do you mean? I've got Maps on my laptop right here: http://i.imgur.com/6AeugdX.png http://i.imgur.com/6AeugdX.png If you're asking why they don't open them up to non-macOS computers, that's Apple's long-standing strategy of making the software part of the selling point of the hardware.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Somewhat related...what does Apple have in their data centers? I'm curious if they run their own sort of hackintoshes for the density of racked servers. Or if they run some other OS, or just shelves of Pros?
    - no_wizard 9y ago
      I've accidentally hit a error or 2 on their website over the years. Backend linux all the way, I think mostly redhat / centOS given the JBOSS errors. Anyone can feel free to correct me.
      - kejaed 9y ago
        If you search around their job site you'll find jobs with RHEL and Ubuntu as keywords
    - eropple 9y ago
      They're a Linux-heavy shop and, judging from the recruiter pings I get, a lot of Mesos.
- Tanegashima 9y ago
  Apple doesn't care about running in other platforms unless it's for profit, so Web technologies are very low priority. As for services, their iTunes platform is really 1950s technology, but it works. I don't know how a company that makes the world's most used Internet service in transactions per second (Apple Push Notifications Service), which works very well, may be "bad".
  - rimliu 9y ago
    A lot of "modern" web tech first went live on iPhone: CSS animations/transforms, canvas, etc.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
personjerry 9y ago
Next up: You can now get Stories on all Apple iCloud connected platforms!
tedmiston 9y ago
Direct link to Apple demo - https://developer.apple.com/live-photos/ https://developer.apple.com/live-photos/
- ggrochow 9y ago
  Could just be my browser, but it doesn't seem to play very nicely for me ( Firefox on debian jessie ). First time I tried to hover, it didn't do anything at all, I think it might have still been loading ( or waiting to load the 'live' version until I hover over ). When I got it to actually go 'live' they didn't seem smooth at all, stuff was jumping all over the place. Though, after watching them both fully, repeat playbacks seemed fine. didn't get either of these issues in chrome on the same machine.
  - MitchellCash 9y ago
    I'm experiencing the same jumpy Live Photos on Firefox for iOS. Latest version of both iOS and Firefox.
  - hyperpape 9y ago
    Similar in mobile safari, most recent iOS version (10.3.1). They seemed very jumpy, not like my own live photos on my phone.
    - tedmiston 9y ago
      I'm seeing the same in Mobile Safari though it works normally in Safari on a Mac.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - codazoda 9y ago
    Looks jumpy then blurry on a Pixel XL in Chrome. Not at all something I would want to embed. I'm guessing it looks better on iPhone and/or desktop.
  - 9y ago
metaphor 9y ago
What differentiates a Live Photo from a GIF? What exactly is an Apple site?
- shadowfiend 9y ago
  Live Photos combine two things: the 3s video capture (1.5s before and 1.5s after you take the picture) at relatively low resolution, and the actual photo that is taken at full camera resolution. GIFs are missing the latter, and are more flexible in terms of length and what have you. This particular presentation also sticks to Apple's standard presentation of Live Photos: as a static high-res photo with an encircled play button (in some cases including the world LIVE) that triggers the associated low-res video. EDIT: No idea what you're asking about re: an Apple site. This is Apple releasing JS to make it easy to display a Live Photo on any site.
  - metaphor 9y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. The Apple site question was me thinking that the API was part of some sort of web front-end that only Apple users were privy to, if you will.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  You should probably be asking what differentiates it from a video file. GIF is horrible - it's limited to 256 colors, and it sucks at compression compared to MP4, let alone HEVC.
  - Ezhik 9y ago
    Nobody coming up with these GIF killers gets what made GIF popular - it's simple as hell. A gif will play on anything, and you can easily save it the same way you'd save a photo. Life's good. Now try to save a gif on Twitter without resorting to scripts or developer tools. Try to right click and save an Imgur gifv, then upload that back to imgur again. GIFs are simple. You save an image file. You're done. Video is complex. You can't just have an mp4 (well, x264) file because that's patent-troubled. You can't just have a webm file because that's not supported by Apple devices. Even these live photos are difficult. You need to add Apple JavaScript to your page, and the live photos themselves are made up of two files: >Your Live Photo will be stored as a pair of files: a JPG file and a MOV file. Yeah, GIF itself is a bad format, but simplicity is why it's still around.
msoad 9y ago
Safari has 3DTouch aka ForceTouch APIs but this doesn't seem to be using it. Weird
arrty88 9y ago
apple trying to steal imgur's thunder i see
metaphor 9y ago
A quick Google search for apple live photo patent produced this article[1] from back in January. Patent description here[2]. Seriously sounds like Apple is posturing to reap some buku royalties if this proprietary method gains traction. [1] https://www.appleworld.today/blog/2017/1/19/apples-dynamic-cinemagraph-presentations-patent-filing-takes-live-photos-to-another-level https://www.appleworld.today/blog/2017/1/19/apples-dynamic-c... [2] https://www.google.com/patents/US20170017616 https://www.google.com/patents/US20170017616
- nudpiedo 9y ago
  This concern plus the fact that the license they use is by no means a common OS license. I also think that is a way to make some side cash but live photos didn't take that much over in the popular culture.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Tanegashima 9y ago
  Yeah, sure, the richest company in the world is going after your petty money with this.
  - metaphor 9y ago
    I definitely didn't suggest average broke-ass Joe. I was thinking more along the lines of media/news websites whose developers haphazardly leverage the format without considering patent implications.
    - Tanegashima 9y ago
      Sure thing...
- xroche 9y ago
  * Non-innovative, existing technology, presented as a breakthroughc by Apple * Stupid patent, demonstrating once again the insanely broken to death patent system * Proprietary technology used for an animated GIF * Top on hacker news
sharkjacobs 9y ago
Apple needs to improve the image stabilization on live photos. I like live photos a lot now, but I had disabled them until I discovered Google's Motion Stills app.
- fowl2 9y ago
  ( iOS only :( https://get.google.com/motionstills/ https://get.google.com/motionstills/ )
  - nojvek 9y ago
    Pretty aweful UX. No way to filter only videos. Seems like an app released for someone to get a promo. Also no android version seems quality folks just seems like another app that won't survive till the next year
    - alexbilbie 9y ago
      > No way to filter only videos It only shows live photos in Motion Stills, not just any photo/video. > Seems like an app released for someone to get a promo Anything to substantiate this claim? The announcement blog post clearly shows it's because of their research into video stabilisation that this app came about as a result - https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/motion-stills-create-beautiful-gifs.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/motion-stills-create... > Also no android version Does Android support the Apple Live Photo format?
  - timdorr 9y ago
    Live Photos are an iOS only feature, so that makes sense. Closest thing is Smartburst, which can turn the series of photos into an animated GIF on the Google Camera app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.GoogleCamera https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
    - soylentcola 9y ago
      Yeah, this is a feature I've been using and enjoying since they added it a while back. I was under the impression that Google created the iOS "Motion Stills" app to add similar functionality to Apple's built-in Live Photos and turn then into stabilized animated GIFs so you can get them off your iPhone in a more widely supported format.
aphextron 9y ago
Is this why Apple won't allow WebM on iOS? It's like they want to pull the web apart, stick it behind a private API, then sell it back to you piece by piece. What is this even supposed to be beyond webm/gifv anyways?
- chrisballinger 9y ago
  The main reason they don't allow WebM is because only H.264/H.265 are hardware accelerated on iOS devices.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - aphextron 9y ago
    >The main reason they don't allow WebM is because only H.264/H.265 are hardware accelerated on iOS devices. And the only reason they don't support VP8/VP9 is because they can't lock it down like H.264. It's the same reason webGL support in iOS Safari took forever. Apple didn't like the idea of developers being able to create and distribute really advanced hardware accelerated 3D games on the iPhone outside of the official app store ecosystem. They need to support open standards for the sake of developers.
    - comex 9y ago
      The two things you cited are completely unrelated. edit: the parent replied to me but deleted their post by the time I finished my response; since I spent the time to write it, I guess I'll put it here: > My point is that Apple repeatedly resists open web standards for the sake of maintaining their walled garden. This new 'feature' is just another example of that. > What is this even supposed to be beyond webm/gifv anyways? WebM is a standard for video. "gifv" is not a standard or even a format; it's just what imgur puts in their URLs for pages that play looping silent videos, simulating the GIF experience. You can only watch "gifv" on imgur, though of course any site can play a looping silent video. "Live Photos" is a broadly similar concept to "gifv", in the sense that both are basically just a proprietary brand for a basic UI on top of a video player, not anything with deep technical content. However, the UX is somewhat different. Live Photos combine a high-resolution photo with a lower-quality video, and the video doesn't play until you mouse over. (The actual photo and video are just JPG and MP4, respectively.) In theory, the idea of treating a photo-video pair like a photo could be standardized, but it's not any less standard than gifv, and at least when it comes to display on websites (as opposed to, e.g., photo gallery apps), it's a simple enough concept that there doesn't seem to be much benefit in standardization. Apple released a small bit of code, for anyone to use on their own website, to do the job of drawing the UI and transitioning between the photo and video; of course, this is implemented on top of open web standards. Not sure why you want to crucify them over that.
tzakrajs 9y ago
Very choppy on Android Chrome Browser running on an LG V20
untog 9y ago
A JS framework to... run play() on a video tag when you tap on it. If this was released by anyone other than Apple it would be mocked to death.
- comex 9y ago
  Actually, to transition between a photo and a video when you hover over a specific-looking badge, which is also animated to show loading progress. It's not a huge piece of code, but if the question is how much code you need to put in a npm module to justify its existence… well, it's a lot bigger than left-pad!
- tajen 9y ago
  Live Photos pose another problem for me – peer mockery. Here how it goes: — Press on the pic and it moves. It's magic. It even starts half a second before the press. — OMG it looks like journals in Harry Potter!!! Send the Gif to me! — Nope, can't, not a Gif — What!? Hahaha! So you neither have proper earphones nor a way to back up your Live photos!? I bought the iPhone 7 for the secure enclave and for Tim's standoff against the FBI, and Safari's reading mode is a bonus against ads, but the social standing of owning an iPhone is not what it used to be...
  - HappyTypist 9y ago
    GIFs are too heavily compressed, with too few colors, etc. Pretty much all iOS apps support live photos; you can iMessage them; you can even download apps to get the video file or convert it to a GIF.
    - onion2k 9y ago
      GIFs are too heavily compressed, with too few colors, etc. Technically GIFs can have as many colors as you like. Each frame can have its own 256 color palette, and any transparent pixels are left the color of the pixel from the previous frame, so you can build up a full color image over time. This is silly and you'd never actually do it, but still, it is possible. Technical explanation and demo: https://notes.tweakblogs.net/blog/8712/high-color-gif-images.html https://notes.tweakblogs.net/blog/8712/high-color-gif-images...
la_oveja 9y ago
Okay, so what differentiates a Live Photo from a jpg&webm combo? It does have a proprietary format or it is saved as a zip?
- pluma 9y ago
  Ah, you see, a HTML5 video tag with a webm and `poster` image doesn't have the blurry transition when switching between the still image and the video as well as when looping the video. Also of course iOS doesn't support WebM and HTML5 video on iOS is not intended to be used for anything other than full-screen videos because Apple knows best and actually supporting HTML5 media properly would ruin performance (as would supporting WebM without the same optimisations Apple made for H.264). Also of course Live Photos are totally different because they're from Apple, not based on any of those cruddy and boring "open standards". -- But to be serious for a moment: the main difference is that iOS treats them as a thing (unlike a plain "video plus image" combo), so the entire user experience surrounding them is different from recording to sharing them. And technically the still image is higher res whereas the video is lower res (with video+image the image is generally a still frame so res tends to be the same).
kristofferR 9y ago
It's pretty bad that this one works halfway on iOS Safari: https://imgur.com/a/3P7hD https://imgur.com/a/3P7hD As you can see, the text selection pop up is visible while playing the Live Photo.
eehee 9y ago
I played around with this, but had some trouble removing the audio stream from the MOV file using ffmpeg. There's a third data stream in the file, and ffmpeg doesn't know how to handle it, so it either gets removed or replaced with dummy data. The javascript framework seems to need this third stream to work, which is pretty annoying... I'd love to do something with this, but without a simple (and preferably scriptable) way to remove the audio I probably won't...

112 points by jackgavigan 9y ago

Could this be a sign that Apple is beginning to 'get' web services? Their new maps in 3d is industry leading, but is missing a web api, and you still need an AppleId to view it.

threeseed 9y ago
Apple 'gets' web services. They run some of the largest web services platforms in the world i.e. iCloud, Messages, iTunes Store, Apple Online Store. They just choose not to release an advertising supported Maps platform because (a) advertising goes against their strong privacy/security message and (b) it doesn't offer anything unique or valuable to the market. To be honest I don't think they would've even gone into Maps if Google hadn't played hard ball during the iPhone 1 days.
- berberous 9y ago
  None of that is the web though. Why can't the open up Apple Maps and the App Store so you can browse it on a laptop (and initiate remote app installs like with Google Play)? That has nothing to do with ads.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    What are you talking about ? iCloud, iTunes Store and Apple Online Store all have public facing web sites. And web services does not mean web sites. It means having APIs exposed (internally or externally) over web protocols i.e. HTTP which they all do. And you can use Apple Maps on a laptop. Just that it has to be a Mac.
    - kaishiro 9y ago
      While I'm not interested in getting into a semantic argument around something arbitrary like what "getting the web" means, unless I'm missing something (which is absolutely possible!) I don't think it's fair to compare the Apple App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/ios/id36?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/ios/id36?mt=8) to the Google Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps?hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps?hl=en). One of these is clearly baked for the web, and one of these is not. Also, as an aside, if I have missed something and there is a better app store experience for Apple please let me know - I just chose the top result searching for "Apple App Store".
      - narrowrail 9y ago
        Apple optimizes their app stores for devices that are able to actually install these apps. I don't think it's as convoluted as you seem to think it is. I have one Apple device (MBA) and I have never agreed to the iTunes TOS and never opened it. I have no interest in the App Store except when nagged for updates. Homebrew and SSH to my linux desktop fulfill my needs, and after 4+ years I get ~6hrs battery life. The web has really gone down hill, and one thing I actually like about Apple is they embrace more of the internet than just the web/advertising.
        kaishiro 9y ago
        "Apple optimizes their app stores for devices that are able to actually install these apps." Right, yes, we agree on that. And I don't find anything at all convoluted about it, I'm not sure why you would think that - there is nothing particularly complex about any of this. My only point is that, in my personal opinion, it's a far nicer experience to explore apps for potential install on an Android phone, via the play store website, then it is for an Apple phone, via this...listing page - when you're not on the device itself. It's possible I'm simply in the minority here but when I'm chilling on the couch thinking I need a new (insert application here), I'd rather use the screen with more real estate. Re: your battery life...cool?
        9y ago
  - derefr 9y ago
    What do you mean? I've got Maps on my laptop right here: http://i.imgur.com/6AeugdX.png http://i.imgur.com/6AeugdX.png If you're asking why they don't open them up to non-macOS computers, that's Apple's long-standing strategy of making the software part of the selling point of the hardware.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Somewhat related...what does Apple have in their data centers? I'm curious if they run their own sort of hackintoshes for the density of racked servers. Or if they run some other OS, or just shelves of Pros?
  - no_wizard 9y ago
    I've accidentally hit a error or 2 on their website over the years. Backend linux all the way, I think mostly redhat / centOS given the JBOSS errors. Anyone can feel free to correct me.
    - kejaed 9y ago
      If you search around their job site you'll find jobs with RHEL and Ubuntu as keywords
  - eropple 9y ago
    They're a Linux-heavy shop and, judging from the recruiter pings I get, a lot of Mesos.
Tanegashima 9y ago
Apple doesn't care about running in other platforms unless it's for profit, so Web technologies are very low priority. As for services, their iTunes platform is really 1950s technology, but it works. I don't know how a company that makes the world's most used Internet service in transactions per second (Apple Push Notifications Service), which works very well, may be "bad".
- rimliu 9y ago
  A lot of "modern" web tech first went live on iPhone: CSS animations/transforms, canvas, etc.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

personjerry 9y ago

Next up: You can now get Stories on all Apple iCloud connected platforms!

tedmiston 9y ago

Direct link to Apple demo - https://developer.apple.com/live-photos/ https://developer.apple.com/live-photos/

ggrochow 9y ago
Could just be my browser, but it doesn't seem to play very nicely for me ( Firefox on debian jessie ). First time I tried to hover, it didn't do anything at all, I think it might have still been loading ( or waiting to load the 'live' version until I hover over ). When I got it to actually go 'live' they didn't seem smooth at all, stuff was jumping all over the place. Though, after watching them both fully, repeat playbacks seemed fine. didn't get either of these issues in chrome on the same machine.
- MitchellCash 9y ago
  I'm experiencing the same jumpy Live Photos on Firefox for iOS. Latest version of both iOS and Firefox.
- hyperpape 9y ago
  Similar in mobile safari, most recent iOS version (10.3.1). They seemed very jumpy, not like my own live photos on my phone.
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    I'm seeing the same in Mobile Safari though it works normally in Safari on a Mac.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- codazoda 9y ago
  Looks jumpy then blurry on a Pixel XL in Chrome. Not at all something I would want to embed. I'm guessing it looks better on iPhone and/or desktop.
- 9y ago

metaphor 9y ago

What differentiates a Live Photo from a GIF? What exactly is an Apple site?

shadowfiend 9y ago
Live Photos combine two things: the 3s video capture (1.5s before and 1.5s after you take the picture) at relatively low resolution, and the actual photo that is taken at full camera resolution. GIFs are missing the latter, and are more flexible in terms of length and what have you. This particular presentation also sticks to Apple's standard presentation of Live Photos: as a static high-res photo with an encircled play button (in some cases including the world LIVE) that triggers the associated low-res video. EDIT: No idea what you're asking about re: an Apple site. This is Apple releasing JS to make it easy to display a Live Photo on any site.
- metaphor 9y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. The Apple site question was me thinking that the API was part of some sort of web front-end that only Apple users were privy to, if you will.
olegkikin 9y ago
You should probably be asking what differentiates it from a video file. GIF is horrible - it's limited to 256 colors, and it sucks at compression compared to MP4, let alone HEVC.
- Ezhik 9y ago
  Nobody coming up with these GIF killers gets what made GIF popular - it's simple as hell. A gif will play on anything, and you can easily save it the same way you'd save a photo. Life's good. Now try to save a gif on Twitter without resorting to scripts or developer tools. Try to right click and save an Imgur gifv, then upload that back to imgur again. GIFs are simple. You save an image file. You're done. Video is complex. You can't just have an mp4 (well, x264) file because that's patent-troubled. You can't just have a webm file because that's not supported by Apple devices. Even these live photos are difficult. You need to add Apple JavaScript to your page, and the live photos themselves are made up of two files: >Your Live Photo will be stored as a pair of files: a JPG file and a MOV file. Yeah, GIF itself is a bad format, but simplicity is why it's still around.

msoad 9y ago

Safari has 3DTouch aka ForceTouch APIs but this doesn't seem to be using it. Weird

arrty88 9y ago

apple trying to steal imgur's thunder i see

metaphor 9y ago

A quick Google search for apple live photo patent produced this article[1] from back in January. Patent description here[2]. Seriously sounds like Apple is posturing to reap some buku royalties if this proprietary method gains traction. [1] https://www.appleworld.today/blog/2017/1/19/apples-dynamic-cinemagraph-presentations-patent-filing-takes-live-photos-to-another-level https://www.appleworld.today/blog/2017/1/19/apples-dynamic-c... [2] https://www.google.com/patents/US20170017616 https://www.google.com/patents/US20170017616

nudpiedo 9y ago
This concern plus the fact that the license they use is by no means a common OS license. I also think that is a way to make some side cash but live photos didn't take that much over in the popular culture.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Tanegashima 9y ago
Yeah, sure, the richest company in the world is going after your petty money with this.
- metaphor 9y ago
  I definitely didn't suggest average broke-ass Joe. I was thinking more along the lines of media/news websites whose developers haphazardly leverage the format without considering patent implications.
  - Tanegashima 9y ago
    Sure thing...
xroche 9y ago
* Non-innovative, existing technology, presented as a breakthroughc by Apple * Stupid patent, demonstrating once again the insanely broken to death patent system * Proprietary technology used for an animated GIF * Top on hacker news

sharkjacobs 9y ago

Apple needs to improve the image stabilization on live photos. I like live photos a lot now, but I had disabled them until I discovered Google's Motion Stills app.

fowl2 9y ago
( iOS only :( https://get.google.com/motionstills/ https://get.google.com/motionstills/ )
- nojvek 9y ago
  Pretty aweful UX. No way to filter only videos. Seems like an app released for someone to get a promo. Also no android version seems quality folks just seems like another app that won't survive till the next year
  - alexbilbie 9y ago
    > No way to filter only videos It only shows live photos in Motion Stills, not just any photo/video. > Seems like an app released for someone to get a promo Anything to substantiate this claim? The announcement blog post clearly shows it's because of their research into video stabilisation that this app came about as a result - https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/motion-stills-create-beautiful-gifs.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/motion-stills-create... > Also no android version Does Android support the Apple Live Photo format?
- timdorr 9y ago
  Live Photos are an iOS only feature, so that makes sense. Closest thing is Smartburst, which can turn the series of photos into an animated GIF on the Google Camera app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.GoogleCamera https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
  - soylentcola 9y ago
    Yeah, this is a feature I've been using and enjoying since they added it a while back. I was under the impression that Google created the iOS "Motion Stills" app to add similar functionality to Apple's built-in Live Photos and turn then into stabilized animated GIFs so you can get them off your iPhone in a more widely supported format.

aphextron 9y ago

Is this why Apple won't allow WebM on iOS? It's like they want to pull the web apart, stick it behind a private API, then sell it back to you piece by piece. What is this even supposed to be beyond webm/gifv anyways?

chrisballinger 9y ago
The main reason they don't allow WebM is because only H.264/H.265 are hardware accelerated on iOS devices.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aphextron 9y ago
  >The main reason they don't allow WebM is because only H.264/H.265 are hardware accelerated on iOS devices. And the only reason they don't support VP8/VP9 is because they can't lock it down like H.264. It's the same reason webGL support in iOS Safari took forever. Apple didn't like the idea of developers being able to create and distribute really advanced hardware accelerated 3D games on the iPhone outside of the official app store ecosystem. They need to support open standards for the sake of developers.
  - comex 9y ago
    The two things you cited are completely unrelated. edit: the parent replied to me but deleted their post by the time I finished my response; since I spent the time to write it, I guess I'll put it here: > My point is that Apple repeatedly resists open web standards for the sake of maintaining their walled garden. This new 'feature' is just another example of that. > What is this even supposed to be beyond webm/gifv anyways? WebM is a standard for video. "gifv" is not a standard or even a format; it's just what imgur puts in their URLs for pages that play looping silent videos, simulating the GIF experience. You can only watch "gifv" on imgur, though of course any site can play a looping silent video. "Live Photos" is a broadly similar concept to "gifv", in the sense that both are basically just a proprietary brand for a basic UI on top of a video player, not anything with deep technical content. However, the UX is somewhat different. Live Photos combine a high-resolution photo with a lower-quality video, and the video doesn't play until you mouse over. (The actual photo and video are just JPG and MP4, respectively.) In theory, the idea of treating a photo-video pair like a photo could be standardized, but it's not any less standard than gifv, and at least when it comes to display on websites (as opposed to, e.g., photo gallery apps), it's a simple enough concept that there doesn't seem to be much benefit in standardization. Apple released a small bit of code, for anyone to use on their own website, to do the job of drawing the UI and transitioning between the photo and video; of course, this is implemented on top of open web standards. Not sure why you want to crucify them over that.

tzakrajs 9y ago

Very choppy on Android Chrome Browser running on an LG V20

untog 9y ago

A JS framework to... run play() on a video tag when you tap on it. If this was released by anyone other than Apple it would be mocked to death.

comex 9y ago
Actually, to transition between a photo and a video when you hover over a specific-looking badge, which is also animated to show loading progress. It's not a huge piece of code, but if the question is how much code you need to put in a npm module to justify its existence… well, it's a lot bigger than left-pad!
tajen 9y ago
Live Photos pose another problem for me – peer mockery. Here how it goes: — Press on the pic and it moves. It's magic. It even starts half a second before the press. — OMG it looks like journals in Harry Potter!!! Send the Gif to me! — Nope, can't, not a Gif — What!? Hahaha! So you neither have proper earphones nor a way to back up your Live photos!? I bought the iPhone 7 for the secure enclave and for Tim's standoff against the FBI, and Safari's reading mode is a bonus against ads, but the social standing of owning an iPhone is not what it used to be...
- HappyTypist 9y ago
  GIFs are too heavily compressed, with too few colors, etc. Pretty much all iOS apps support live photos; you can iMessage them; you can even download apps to get the video file or convert it to a GIF.
  - onion2k 9y ago
    GIFs are too heavily compressed, with too few colors, etc. Technically GIFs can have as many colors as you like. Each frame can have its own 256 color palette, and any transparent pixels are left the color of the pixel from the previous frame, so you can build up a full color image over time. This is silly and you'd never actually do it, but still, it is possible. Technical explanation and demo: https://notes.tweakblogs.net/blog/8712/high-color-gif-images.html https://notes.tweakblogs.net/blog/8712/high-color-gif-images...

la_oveja 9y ago

Okay, so what differentiates a Live Photo from a jpg&webm combo? It does have a proprietary format or it is saved as a zip?

pluma 9y ago
Ah, you see, a HTML5 video tag with a webm and `poster` image doesn't have the blurry transition when switching between the still image and the video as well as when looping the video. Also of course iOS doesn't support WebM and HTML5 video on iOS is not intended to be used for anything other than full-screen videos because Apple knows best and actually supporting HTML5 media properly would ruin performance (as would supporting WebM without the same optimisations Apple made for H.264). Also of course Live Photos are totally different because they're from Apple, not based on any of those cruddy and boring "open standards". -- But to be serious for a moment: the main difference is that iOS treats them as a thing (unlike a plain "video plus image" combo), so the entire user experience surrounding them is different from recording to sharing them. And technically the still image is higher res whereas the video is lower res (with video+image the image is generally a still frame so res tends to be the same).

kristofferR 9y ago

It's pretty bad that this one works halfway on iOS Safari: https://imgur.com/a/3P7hD https://imgur.com/a/3P7hD As you can see, the text selection pop up is visible while playing the Live Photo.

eehee 9y ago

I played around with this, but had some trouble removing the audio stream from the MOV file using ffmpeg. There's a third data stream in the file, and ffmpeg doesn't know how to handle it, so it either gets removed or replaced with dummy data. The javascript framework seems to need this third stream to work, which is pretty annoying... I'd love to do something with this, but without a simple (and preferably scriptable) way to remove the audio I probably won't...