3 ms·

They serve tons of "gifs" as video files already, anything labeled as a gifv is really an html5 video element with MP4 or WebM. It looks just as good and loads

They serve tons of "gifs" as video files already, anything labeled as a gifv is really an html5 video element with MP4 or WebM. It looks just as good and loads much faster. You could put ads on that just as easily, but it'd be a huge dick move if the ads had sound.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Right, and the draw of GIFs is that they have no sound. I’m pretty sure this move might kill Imgur, not that they had a business to begin with. Reddit already switched to an in house S3 bucket and CDN for UGC uploads a while ago, content will either age out with attrition or be backfilled by users. Imgur is going to be quite the ArchiveTeam project.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  reddit video is complete garbage though
  - TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
    I've found it perfectly serviceable. Especially when youtube is blocked by corporate policy.
    - zwily 8y ago
      What corporate policy blocks Youtube but not Reddit? :)
      - Symbiote 8y ago
        Companies concerned about bandwidth rather than content. I used to work somewhere that banned radio streaming sites, until the local ISP became willing to upgrade the connection.
  - always_good 8y ago
    They're probably paying for some low-tier bandwidth. That's something that can always be changed. But the real upside is that your uploads will live along with your reddit post. Amazing how reddit becomes a dead-link factory when you go back just one year.
    - pavs 8y ago
      I don't know what low-tier BW means (I own an ISP), I think they problem reddit video is that their video infrastructure is most likely not geographically distributed and also not have peering with major telcos, which gives you high latency and poor playback for people who lives far from reddit video servers. Maybe they will eventually fix it, not sure if they have that much money to burn on repeated memes and porn videos.
      - always_good 8y ago
        You own an ISP and couldn't even fathom a guess? Which ISP so I can remember this little exchange?
      - corobo 8y ago
        They use fastly, a quick DNS lookup shows that even without whoising the resulting IP address > dig v.redd.it +short reddit.map.fastly.net. 151.101.17.140
        pavs 8y ago
        Then something is wrong with their setup. It's just not me. I have seen many comments on Reddit on how horrible their video platform is, it takes forever to load.
- walrus01 8y ago
  I give it about 50-50 odds that doing this doesn't kill it but relegates it to irrelevancy, like Photobucket and similar.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  Maybe I'm unlucky but in my experience the reddit video player is terrible and maybe 25% of the of the time just gives me a black box or the first frame and won't play. It also has the caveat that if you want to share it with someone you have to send them a link to the reddit comment thread, which is not always desired or appropriate.
  - chipperyman573 8y ago
    BTW I've had the same problem, the solution is to just click it twice (once to "pause" it and once to unpause it). For what it's worth I've only gotten this problem since chrome released their update that disables autoplay (https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-object-model.html https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-o...). I think the black box just means that the first frame is black
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      Most of the times I've had it are on iOS, and no amount of tapping or putting it in full screen mode where you can use the native video controls will make it load. I wonder if they're trying to serve WebM or some other unsupported codec to iOS devices by accident, but I'd think that would have some kind of error indication instead of a black box.
  - ohtwenty 8y ago
    I recently discovered that youtube-dl works on v.redd.it links, so you can download and share the vids directly. But I'm with you 100%, their video and image hosting is super slow, and needs to be paused/unpaused a few times before loading or playing anything.
- debaserab2 8y ago
  I absolutely hate that you can't link directly to the media on reddit's hosting service. If I share something with a friend, I usually am not doing it so they can read a forum of internet comments first. This is something that imgur hasn't done and will continue to be an important differentiator for me.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Almost every image I see on Reddit uses imgur, and some subreddits have an explicit ban on using Reddit image hosting for some reason.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

Right, and the draw of GIFs is that they have no sound. I’m pretty sure this move might kill Imgur, not that they had a business to begin with. Reddit already switched to an in house S3 bucket and CDN for UGC uploads a while ago, content will either age out with attrition or be backfilled by users. Imgur is going to be quite the ArchiveTeam project.

TremendousJudge 8y ago
reddit video is complete garbage though
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
  I've found it perfectly serviceable. Especially when youtube is blocked by corporate policy.
  - zwily 8y ago
    What corporate policy blocks Youtube but not Reddit? :)
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      Companies concerned about bandwidth rather than content. I used to work somewhere that banned radio streaming sites, until the local ISP became willing to upgrade the connection.
- always_good 8y ago
  They're probably paying for some low-tier bandwidth. That's something that can always be changed. But the real upside is that your uploads will live along with your reddit post. Amazing how reddit becomes a dead-link factory when you go back just one year.
  - pavs 8y ago
    I don't know what low-tier BW means (I own an ISP), I think they problem reddit video is that their video infrastructure is most likely not geographically distributed and also not have peering with major telcos, which gives you high latency and poor playback for people who lives far from reddit video servers. Maybe they will eventually fix it, not sure if they have that much money to burn on repeated memes and porn videos.
    - always_good 8y ago
      You own an ISP and couldn't even fathom a guess? Which ISP so I can remember this little exchange?
    - corobo 8y ago
      They use fastly, a quick DNS lookup shows that even without whoising the resulting IP address > dig v.redd.it +short reddit.map.fastly.net. 151.101.17.140
      - pavs 8y ago
        Then something is wrong with their setup. It's just not me. I have seen many comments on Reddit on how horrible their video platform is, it takes forever to load.
walrus01 8y ago
I give it about 50-50 odds that doing this doesn't kill it but relegates it to irrelevancy, like Photobucket and similar.
wlesieutre 8y ago
Maybe I'm unlucky but in my experience the reddit video player is terrible and maybe 25% of the of the time just gives me a black box or the first frame and won't play. It also has the caveat that if you want to share it with someone you have to send them a link to the reddit comment thread, which is not always desired or appropriate.
- chipperyman573 8y ago
  BTW I've had the same problem, the solution is to just click it twice (once to "pause" it and once to unpause it). For what it's worth I've only gotten this problem since chrome released their update that disables autoplay (https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-object-model.html https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-o...). I think the black box just means that the first frame is black
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    Most of the times I've had it are on iOS, and no amount of tapping or putting it in full screen mode where you can use the native video controls will make it load. I wonder if they're trying to serve WebM or some other unsupported codec to iOS devices by accident, but I'd think that would have some kind of error indication instead of a black box.
- ohtwenty 8y ago
  I recently discovered that youtube-dl works on v.redd.it links, so you can download and share the vids directly. But I'm with you 100%, their video and image hosting is super slow, and needs to be paused/unpaused a few times before loading or playing anything.
debaserab2 8y ago
I absolutely hate that you can't link directly to the media on reddit's hosting service. If I share something with a friend, I usually am not doing it so they can read a forum of internet comments first. This is something that imgur hasn't done and will continue to be an important differentiator for me.
pjc50 8y ago
Almost every image I see on Reddit uses imgur, and some subreddits have an explicit ban on using Reddit image hosting for some reason.