6 ms·

Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

84 points by sgehlich 14y ago

toadburglar 14y ago
I do like the interface, but in Firefox it's quit unresponsive and clunky, but a lot smoother in Safari. Either way, it was still quite difficult to actually find the start and end points I wanted. Not sure if this is something YouTube's end, like not allowing access to that certain point in the video. I agree with other(s) when I say the quality is quite terrible, but hopefully some tweaks with FFMPEG, or maybe even another route. I do like the neatness and unobtrusive-ness of the watermark though. I think over all, it shows a lot of promise, but need to fine tune those UI controls and make it clearer/easier to select a timeframe, and improve the quality of the GIF somewhat too :)
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Totally agreeing to the points you mentioned. At first we only had like one timeframe selector, but since videos can be pretty long, we added the zoom selection (the upper one), but it's quite hard to figure out how to handle them correctly. Actually you can use it very precisely if you know how. I guess the first thing I will do is add an instruction video or a short tutorial to make clear what the controls are there for. The problem with Firefox is that the videos we are getting from YouTube and Vimeo are MP4. Since Firefox does not support the h264 codec right now, I had to implement a flash fallback which is not responsive at all. I wonder why people still use Firefox, though :P I'll take some time tomorrow to have a closer look at the gif encoding code of FFmpeg to make it use another color palette. This is quite complicated though, so it might take some time. For now, we have to consider ourselves satisfied with the quality :( Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!
Toshio 14y ago
HN effect already, site down.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Fixed already, thanks for the comment though :)
Hemospectrum 14y ago
Is the name a recursive apology for its own terrible pun?
- s04p 14y ago
  In that case it would be a great pun, wouldn't it?
- sylvinus 14y ago
  I think it's more an apology for adding more GIFs to the Internet :)
citricsquid 14y ago
I really like the interface, it's very clever, only problem I'm having is you have the 5 second gif limit but that isn't explained anywhere and there's no indication of how long 5 seconds is on the timeline. I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long have 50% of it grey. I've used another site for this before (called Gifsoup: http://gifsoup.com/ http://gifsoup.com/) and they charge about $5/m for the option to make longer gifs with no watermark, I think this would be something you could offer. I would definitely convert as I prefer your interface. edit: The gif quality is pretty terrible, can that be improved? edit edit: If you click "post to forgif.me" and then have to login and then login it loses the URL, you have to go back to find it again and click the button again.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Thanks for your suggestion, I really appreciate it! The idea of greying the indicator out is nice, I'll implement it tomorrow. Yes, we were already thinking about providing such a premium service, we'll see what we can do. Right now it's just an experiment, let's hope it'll get bigger :) Edit: We slice the video into frames by using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, the gif encoder of ffmpeg uses a pretty bad color palette, I already dived into the encoder code but didn't manage to improve it. I'll work on it though. Edit edit: Yup, known issue, gotta fix that today!
  - bloggergirl 14y ago
    I happen to like the grainy feel, actually. It's like a filter from the 70s --- you could position it as the "forgif.me" look-and-feel, in an Instagram sort of way. HD isn't always better. :) One recommendation, in addition to other people's notes about messaging the 5-sec limit: Try adding a line of copy on your home page indicating what this site is / what to do there. The HN post title you used could do the trick --- as it obviously worked for everyone who clicked thru and tried it (myself included).
  - coryl 14y ago
    Cofounder of GifSoup.com here (before we sold it off). Prepare to have your bandwidth obliterated. You'll need to pay for way better hosting, people are literally going to hotlink you to death. I'm not sure if your downloading process has a progress bar, but I suggest you implement one to keep impatient people from leaving (it looks like you do, but your server just might be unresponsive at the moment). Your hosting bill is going to add up quick if you want to keep the service live and as is, so I suggest you implement a premium service. I don't think GIFs are a particularly profitable business, but we had fun with it, and its cool to see our watermarked GIFs on random places like Reddit. Enjoy!
Toshio 14y ago
How long should it take to split a video, I think it's been 5 minutes already, and it's still chugging away.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Yeah the server it's running on is pretty damn slow. We will move to another server in the next days. Unfortunately we don't show the progress of the video splitting right now. Try again if it takes to long. Sorry for that!
the-kenny 14y ago
Works pretty good: http://forgif.me/gm http://forgif.me/gm
arunoda 14y ago
This is so cool. Hot Videos are so funnly :)
- arunoda 14y ago
  I'm sorry I mean gifs :)
edwinyzh 14y ago
It'll be great if uploading files are allowed.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Yup, that's another thing we are planning for the future. Thanks for your feedback!
braco_alva 14y ago
I was looking for exactly something like this, really nice interface.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Thank you :)
unkoman 14y ago
The elements are a bit too small to get accurate results. An indicator for when the 5 second limit is reached would be appreciated. Also, please indicate how long I have to wait, it has been splitting video for a long time now.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Both things will be implemented! Thanks for your feedback!
lmroz 14y ago
Great tool! Is there a way to add static text? The 2 usability recommendations I would add are: 1) Tell me how long my video clip is. (Don't make me keep guessing if I am in the 5 second range). 2) After creating the gif, if I don't like it let me go back to the editing screen with the last settings I used. I trimmed a youtube video down in the editor, but when the gif was created a few extra frames seemed to appear in the final product.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Yup, static text is one of the features we are planning for this tool. Currently we round the start and end time (which will be fixed tomorrow) so you won't get very precise results. Also, a "change settings" button will be implemented / we will load the given settings if you reopen the editor.
khakimov 14y ago
Probably will be better to serve static content only by nginx. http://forgif.me/assets/132.gif http://forgif.me/assets/132.gif error from rails. maybe this will help http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with-rails/ http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with-rails/
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Right now we don't have that much traffic, so we wouldn't see a big difference. We will configure nginx precisely when we move to another server, though.
jeffehobbs 14y ago
Excellent work! Love this.
ruxkor 14y ago
Very nice! However, in its current implementation, the service does not seem to optimize the created gifs at all, i.e. all frames are opaque and do not try to reuse existing pixels in the last frame(s). This can be easily changed by using the integrated disposal methods in a gif, as shown on http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm , but afaik ffmpeg does not support this out of the box. It seems imagemagick is able to do some basic optimization, as shown on http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt .
workingbrains 14y ago
Its very nice application
enneff 14y ago
Bug report: I made a gif and halfway through it cut to some other video. Weird. I couldn't pull any kind of unique identifier out of the page to show you, sorry.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Something like this here? http://forgif.me/hc http://forgif.me/hc I'll have a closer look at it when I'm at the office, thanks for the hint!
  - sgehlich 14y ago
    Should be fixed!
dmvaldman 14y ago
any desire to open source your video UI? it's terrific
mrkeyboard 14y ago
Am I the only one experiencing weird ass issues? The editing goes fine, but the produced gif was mixed with another video. Some olympics crowd video of some sort. Very buggy
soufell 14y ago
shameless plug. 4 months ago I released my own similar app. you can visit it here. http://99gifs.com/studio http://99gifs.com/studio Everything is done client side, it uses web workers to render the gif so it doesn't block the UI and it's fast.
sgehlich 14y ago
Sorry, the converter was totally broken for the last few hours. Result: Totally random .gifs. Fixed that, should work now.
yotamda 14y ago
You should post it on Reddit, as it will get lots and lots of usage there.
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Somebody already did, it didn't get a lot of buzz though. Gotta try that later today!

84 points by sgehlich 14y ago

I do like the interface, but in Firefox it's quit unresponsive and clunky, but a lot smoother in Safari. Either way, it was still quite difficult to actually find the start and end points I wanted. Not sure if this is something YouTube's end, like not allowing access to that certain point in the video. I agree with other(s) when I say the quality is quite terrible, but hopefully some tweaks with FFMPEG, or maybe even another route. I do like the neatness and unobtrusive-ness of the watermark though. I think over all, it shows a lot of promise, but need to fine tune those UI controls and make it clearer/easier to select a timeframe, and improve the quality of the GIF somewhat too :)

sgehlich 14y ago
Totally agreeing to the points you mentioned. At first we only had like one timeframe selector, but since videos can be pretty long, we added the zoom selection (the upper one), but it's quite hard to figure out how to handle them correctly. Actually you can use it very precisely if you know how. I guess the first thing I will do is add an instruction video or a short tutorial to make clear what the controls are there for. The problem with Firefox is that the videos we are getting from YouTube and Vimeo are MP4. Since Firefox does not support the h264 codec right now, I had to implement a flash fallback which is not responsive at all. I wonder why people still use Firefox, though :P I'll take some time tomorrow to have a closer look at the gif encoding code of FFmpeg to make it use another color palette. This is quite complicated though, so it might take some time. For now, we have to consider ourselves satisfied with the quality :( Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!

Toshio 14y ago

HN effect already, site down.

sgehlich 14y ago
Fixed already, thanks for the comment though :)

Hemospectrum 14y ago

Is the name a recursive apology for its own terrible pun?

s04p 14y ago
In that case it would be a great pun, wouldn't it?
sylvinus 14y ago
I think it's more an apology for adding more GIFs to the Internet :)

citricsquid 14y ago

I really like the interface, it's very clever, only problem I'm having is you have the 5 second gif limit but that isn't explained anywhere and there's no indication of how long 5 seconds is on the timeline. I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long have 50% of it grey. I've used another site for this before (called Gifsoup: http://gifsoup.com/ http://gifsoup.com/) and they charge about $5/m for the option to make longer gifs with no watermark, I think this would be something you could offer. I would definitely convert as I prefer your interface. edit: The gif quality is pretty terrible, can that be improved? edit edit: If you click "post to forgif.me" and then have to login and then login it loses the URL, you have to go back to find it again and click the button again.

sgehlich 14y ago
Thanks for your suggestion, I really appreciate it! The idea of greying the indicator out is nice, I'll implement it tomorrow. Yes, we were already thinking about providing such a premium service, we'll see what we can do. Right now it's just an experiment, let's hope it'll get bigger :) Edit: We slice the video into frames by using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, the gif encoder of ffmpeg uses a pretty bad color palette, I already dived into the encoder code but didn't manage to improve it. I'll work on it though. Edit edit: Yup, known issue, gotta fix that today!
- bloggergirl 14y ago
  I happen to like the grainy feel, actually. It's like a filter from the 70s --- you could position it as the "forgif.me" look-and-feel, in an Instagram sort of way. HD isn't always better. :) One recommendation, in addition to other people's notes about messaging the 5-sec limit: Try adding a line of copy on your home page indicating what this site is / what to do there. The HN post title you used could do the trick --- as it obviously worked for everyone who clicked thru and tried it (myself included).
- coryl 14y ago
  Cofounder of GifSoup.com here (before we sold it off). Prepare to have your bandwidth obliterated. You'll need to pay for way better hosting, people are literally going to hotlink you to death. I'm not sure if your downloading process has a progress bar, but I suggest you implement one to keep impatient people from leaving (it looks like you do, but your server just might be unresponsive at the moment). Your hosting bill is going to add up quick if you want to keep the service live and as is, so I suggest you implement a premium service. I don't think GIFs are a particularly profitable business, but we had fun with it, and its cool to see our watermarked GIFs on random places like Reddit. Enjoy!

Toshio 14y ago

How long should it take to split a video, I think it's been 5 minutes already, and it's still chugging away.

sgehlich 14y ago
Yeah the server it's running on is pretty damn slow. We will move to another server in the next days. Unfortunately we don't show the progress of the video splitting right now. Try again if it takes to long. Sorry for that!

the-kenny 14y ago

Works pretty good: http://forgif.me/gm http://forgif.me/gm

arunoda 14y ago

This is so cool. Hot Videos are so funnly :)

arunoda 14y ago
I'm sorry I mean gifs :)

edwinyzh 14y ago

It'll be great if uploading files are allowed.

sgehlich 14y ago
Yup, that's another thing we are planning for the future. Thanks for your feedback!

braco_alva 14y ago

I was looking for exactly something like this, really nice interface.

sgehlich 14y ago
Thank you :)

unkoman 14y ago

The elements are a bit too small to get accurate results. An indicator for when the 5 second limit is reached would be appreciated. Also, please indicate how long I have to wait, it has been splitting video for a long time now.

sgehlich 14y ago
Both things will be implemented! Thanks for your feedback!

lmroz 14y ago

Great tool! Is there a way to add static text? The 2 usability recommendations I would add are: 1) Tell me how long my video clip is. (Don't make me keep guessing if I am in the 5 second range). 2) After creating the gif, if I don't like it let me go back to the editing screen with the last settings I used. I trimmed a youtube video down in the editor, but when the gif was created a few extra frames seemed to appear in the final product.

sgehlich 14y ago
Yup, static text is one of the features we are planning for this tool. Currently we round the start and end time (which will be fixed tomorrow) so you won't get very precise results. Also, a "change settings" button will be implemented / we will load the given settings if you reopen the editor.

khakimov 14y ago

Probably will be better to serve static content only by nginx. http://forgif.me/assets/132.gif http://forgif.me/assets/132.gif error from rails. maybe this will help http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with-rails/ http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with-rails/

sgehlich 14y ago
Right now we don't have that much traffic, so we wouldn't see a big difference. We will configure nginx precisely when we move to another server, though.

jeffehobbs 14y ago

Excellent work! Love this.

ruxkor 14y ago

Very nice! However, in its current implementation, the service does not seem to optimize the created gifs at all, i.e. all frames are opaque and do not try to reuse existing pixels in the last frame(s). This can be easily changed by using the integrated disposal methods in a gif, as shown on http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm , but afaik ffmpeg does not support this out of the box. It seems imagemagick is able to do some basic optimization, as shown on http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt .

workingbrains 14y ago

Its very nice application

enneff 14y ago

Bug report: I made a gif and halfway through it cut to some other video. Weird. I couldn't pull any kind of unique identifier out of the page to show you, sorry.

sgehlich 14y ago
Something like this here? http://forgif.me/hc http://forgif.me/hc I'll have a closer look at it when I'm at the office, thanks for the hint!
- sgehlich 14y ago
  Should be fixed!

dmvaldman 14y ago

any desire to open source your video UI? it's terrific

mrkeyboard 14y ago

Am I the only one experiencing weird ass issues? The editing goes fine, but the produced gif was mixed with another video. Some olympics crowd video of some sort. Very buggy

soufell 14y ago

shameless plug. 4 months ago I released my own similar app. you can visit it here. http://99gifs.com/studio http://99gifs.com/studio Everything is done client side, it uses web workers to render the gif so it doesn't block the UI and it's fast.

sgehlich 14y ago

Sorry, the converter was totally broken for the last few hours. Result: Totally random .gifs. Fixed that, should work now.

yotamda 14y ago

You should post it on Reddit, as it will get lots and lots of usage there.

sgehlich 14y ago
Somebody already did, it didn't get a lot of buzz though. Gotta try that later today!