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> no one has yet, it appears, made the <video> element work for this use case. Gfycat seems to be getting more and more popular or at least I'm personally star

• untog 12y ago
  It would be better if the iPhone would play <video> tags without user interaction. I get the reason why they disabled that back when the iPhone first came out, but GIFs use up more bandwidth than videos, so they're actually punishing users.
  • zgohr 12y ago
    Disagree. On the consumer side, I care more about auto-playing audio than bandwidth. On the content owner side, I only want my videos to autoplay (in most circumstances) if it were accompanied by the audio. If I didn't care about audio accompaniment I can already use GIF.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • untog 12y ago
      Perhaps the iPhone should autoplay videos, but muted until you hit a speaker icon (or something). Either way, forcing everyone to use GIF is horrible because of how inefficient it is.
      • maxerickson 12y ago
        I'd like a global option and also some simple per site UI. This is how the click to play in Firefox works, it's nice. One thing I haven't figured out how to do is trust embeds from a site (for example, Youtube and Vimeo both have well behaved embeds, so I'd like to whitelist them, but not many of the third party sites I see them on).
      • syncsynchalt 12y ago
        Agreed, I think of this as the "Vine" model of interaction and it's what I'd prefer. Plus leave off the icon if the webm video has no audio track.
    • pornel 12y ago
      That's only a UI issue. You don't need compression to be horribly inefficient to achieve that :) For example <img src=vid.mp4> could autoplay looped video without audio, just like GIF, except using tiny fraction of bandwidth and CPU (thanks to HW acceleration) than GIF.
  • rasz_pl 12y ago
    this will autoplay no problem on iphone http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/05/mpeg1-video-decoder-in-javascript http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/05/mpeg1-video-decoder-in-java... :)
• dublinben 12y ago
  There's also a similar site[0] which is open source, so you could deploy it yourself if you wanted to. [0]https://mediacru.sh/ https://mediacru.sh/
  • scrollaway 12y ago
    I really wish people on HN stopped linking to gfycat and linked to mediacrush instead. The former seems like a very scummy "lowest common denominator" type of site, while the latter is open source, allows self-hosting, has deterministic hashes, uses strong https encryption, ...
  • mbell 12y ago
    I looked over mediacru.sh and unless I'm missing something it doesn't serve the same purpose as gfycat. The point of gfycat is to upload a gif, it converts it to webm then it gives you a bit of embed code that will try to use the webm variant but will fall back to the gif when unsupported. I didn't see anything in mediacru.sh's code that would allow gif <-> video conversion, I tried uploading a few gifs on their site as well and didn't get any video options back from the API.
    • dbcooper 12y ago
      Mediacru.sh should give you a "view as html 5" option. It did for me when I uploaded a gif a few minutes ago.