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Introducing GIFV
- jarnix 12y agoNothing new, it's been shown before by another website. Plus what the f* with renaming a .mp4 to a .gifv ? Two extensions for the same format ?
- minimaxir 12y agoThe "convert-GIF-to-MP4" technique is the same technique that Twitter [1] and Imgur-competitior Giphy [2] uses. [1] http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-telling-you-about-gifs http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-tell... [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g0791/hey_reddit_were_giphy_lets_talk_about_gifs/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g0791/hey_reddit_were...
- dublinben 12y agoI would say that Gfycat and Mediacru.sh are actually the leading competitors in this area.
- DontBeADick 12y agoIs Mediacru.sh banned from Reddit? I just saw a thread the other day where someone said the domain was blocked by admins to prevent it from competing with their preferred service (probably Gfycat).
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y agomediacru.sh admin here. We used to be banned, many months ago. I was talking about our past troubles in that thread.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dublinben 12y agoI'm a little disappointed that they've not only created an absurd new file extension, but that they're settling on patent-encumbered H.264 video compression.
- mherdeg 12y agoIs this what gfycat does?
- dublinben 12y agoThat site actually uses the superior VP8 compression format in a WebM container.
- wlesieutre 12y agoExcept for being free, WebM was not a "superior compression format" to H264 last I heard. Has it changed recently?
- higherpurpose 12y agoI think it all but caught up lately in VP8 vs h.264 performance. Google kept improving VP8 performance. However, webm has also added VP9 support recently, which is clearly superior.
- wlesieutre 12y agoIs VP9 in much use (compared to VP8)? I've definitely heard good things about it, but I have no idea how well supported it is or whether anybody has it in use yet.
- fleitz 12y agoOh does my iPhone have a VP9 chip in it? Not so superior...
- bqe 12y agoThis is not true. My work, written three years ago, showed that VP8 was inferior to H.264[1] at the time. A more recent paper showed that both VP8 and VP9 are inferior to both H.264 and HEVC[2]. [1]: http://blog.seancassidy.me/h264-and-vp8-compared.html http://blog.seancassidy.me/h264-and-vp8-compared.html [2]: http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26...
- 3rd3 12y agoWhy not WebM?
- masklinn 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
- sauere 12y agoCan't we just all settle for .webm? The cancerous patented MP4/H264 combination must die.
- untog 12y agoUnfortunately .webm doesn't work in IE, OSX Safari or iOS. Though I'd far prefer these services work with both WebM and H264, and use whichever works best.
- davb 12y agoI wonder how many (huge) sites like imgur it would take saying "we're doing webm, if your browser doesn't support it you get a huge, slow GIF instead" for everyone just to settle on a single format? The whole debate is only hurting users and developers, while lining the pockets of MPEGLA (or whoever is responsible for h264 licensing).
- mitchty 12y agoHow many? A lot. And in the mean time, if imgur started to do that, then it will soon start to have a "pdf link warning" in short order as masses of ios/safari/ie users basically segment themselves out of the loop. In the meantime then the alternative sites will pick up in use because they aren't being dicks about a video format. Additionally, what about devices that only have mpeg decoding? Basically you're saying screw you non webm supporting people and your battery life. We don't like your kind around here. Its a great way to kill your site in short. Unless everyone does it at once and upgrades happen to support things, its at best a slow burn like firefox. But at this point webm doesn't have half the use cases as firefox did.
- Daiz 12y ago>I wonder how many (huge) sites like imgur it would take saying "we're doing webm, if your browser doesn't support it you get a huge, slow GIF instead" for everyone just to settle on a single format? It's very unlikely to see that happen, since using H.264 doesn't cost a dime in royalties for sites like imgur that serve the content for free (ads don't count as per the H.264 licensing terms). The only trouble is really on Firefox and any other browser that wants to implement a built-in H.264 decoder, but nothing stops them from working around that via things like OpenH264 or by using system decoders and so on. The same will likely happen with H.265/HEVC, as the recently published licensing terms made it completely royalty-free to use the format itself (including for commercial purposes, you have to pay royalties for that with H.264), and you only have to pay to distribute decoders & encoders. Personally I wish browser vendors would just use whatever's installed on the user system for playing web videos, but for some reason that's not okay because "we need at least one unified always playing format for the web!" and then we don't get that anyway, as the whole WebM mess has clearly shown... Anyway, since imgur is doing the conversion to video by themselves, there's not really any reason why they couldn't do both H.264 MP4s and VP8 WebMs... supporting only one format makes more sense if you allow direct user-encoded video uploads like 4chan does with its WebM support for example. Gotta say I don't like this whole "hey we took HTML5 video with 'autoplay loop muted' properties and branded it GIFV!" shtick, though.
- arrakeen 12y agoan animated gif is not necessarily a video clip, but it seems that i'm in the minority these days. here's a gif by nicolas sassoon, which format would you prefer? http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gif http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gif (1.3 MB) or http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gifv http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gifv (3.9 MB)
- adamesque 12y agoWow, the colors are just gutted in the mp4 version.
- hmage 12y agoYeap, YV12 colourspace doesn't really like sharp pixel-perfect colours.
- basicallydan 12y agoSimple solution: Don't use gifv for all gifs! For a lot of gifs this will massively reduce loading times.
- lobster_johnson 12y agoThe name they propose is "GIF video", though. If it's not video, then you can use GIF instead. Nobody is taking GIF away from you.
- nemo1618 12y ago
- wbond 12y agoAm I misunderstanding something here? I don't see anything other than an .mp4 video served via a <video> tag from a URL that ends in .gifv. I was interested in seeing how it worked to look into supporting it for a mime type detection library I've written. The blog post mentions submitting a specification to the relevant standards organization. Are they planning on creating a new mp4 ftyp and registering a mimetype with IANA?
- chillingeffect 12y agoYes, why are they calling mp4 files gifv files? Is it somehow cooler? Can I start serving .html files as .awesome files? And .js as .kicka$$ files? and .mp3 as .boomin'? GET "index.awesome" <script src='jquery.kicka$$'> <audio src="foil.boomin'"> at this rate, why not re-write all of html so it's cooler? <body> => <b0d> <title> => <1nduk+10n> <link rel="openid.server" href=""> => <cyb3r-jack rel=!!openid.matrix_data_cent3r" ultra_max_hyper_ref="">
- personZ 12y agoCan I start serving .html files as .awesome files? Sure, go ahead. Extensions in a URL have little to do with the actual type of content, and .html has long been abandoned by dynamic systems, who originally went to extensions being an implementation detail, and on many current systems being a lie (e.g. the .aspx extension that actually runs a PHP page that returns an HTML5 file). They're using a URL extension to signal to their system what to do with the file, which in the case of GIFV is to wrap an MP4 video in a simple HTML5 container. Eh.
- Supermighty 12y agoI can't upvote you enough. Too few people realize that the server returned mimetype actually tells the browser how to handle the content.
- Terretta 12y agoOh how I wish that were true. It's what's intended, but it's not what's true. Usually this bites on video, but it even bites on, say, SVG: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10261460/internet-explorer-ignoring-mime-type http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10261460/internet-explore... Ostensibly, this is to protect users. Quoting TechNet: When files are served to the client, Internet Explorer uses the following pieces of information to decide how to handle the file: 1. File name extension, the corresponding ProgID and CLSID for the registered handler of that file name extension. 2. Content-Type from the HTTP header (MIME type), the corresponding ProgID, and CLSID for the registered handler of that Content or MIME type. 3. Content-Disposition from the HTTP header. 4. Results of the MIME sniff. -- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787872(v=ws.10).aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787872(v=ws.10)...
- MBCook 12y agoOh thank god. Finally. I've been hoping they'd do this for a while. I hate browsing Reddit and finding a link to a little 'video' that then takes minutes to download fully and still looks terrible because it's a 15MB gif.
- aikah 12y agoI dont get the trick.Is it gif or a h264 video inside a "gif" container? looking at the source code,I see a video tag.
- sbierwagen 12y agoIt's a video served with the video/mp4 content-type, using the .gifv file extension. (Well, actually, the .gifv is just a web page that holds the <video> tags for the mp4, but...)
- masklinn 12y agoIt's standard h.264 in mp4, GIF is only there because… marketing?
- Igglyboo 12y agoIt's an h264 video, they serve it with the .gifv extension but that's just marketing.
- ssalenik 12y agoI don't know if its just me, but the GIFVs embedded on the page dont load for me, unless I click on them to open them in a page on their own, and the second one doesn't play even in this case. Firefox 32.0.3 on Linux
- m_myers 12y agoGIFs just work. GIFVs might or might not work. That's a huge difference.
- Vanayad 12y agoworks for me, chrome / windows
- Forbo 12y agoI'm getting the same behavior in Chromium 38.0.2125.101 (build 290379) on OSX 10.9.4.
- mhandley 12y agoExactly the same for me - Firefox 32.0.3 on MacOS.
- photoGrant 12y agoSame. FireFox 32.0.3 OS X
- rjn 12y agoIt is asking for adobe flash on linux
- u124556 12y agoIt uses flash as a fallback if your browser doesn't support mp4 video.
- saidajigumi 12y agoThat's probably because Firefox on OS X (32.0.3) doesn't yet handle H.264, which is what these GIFV files really are. FF on Windows (32.0.2) does support H.264, and the GIFV files play as expected. IIRC, FF on Android was the first version to get H.264 support, which it's had for some time now. EDIT: You can check codec support for your current browser+platform at YouTube's HTML5 page, below. I briefly dug around in Bugzilla for this issue, but haven't found it yet. https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5
- davexunit 12y agoUgh, MP4. Terrible choice.
- higherpurpose 12y agoWhy didn't they just use webm?
- jawns 12y ago"With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a .gifv extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year." This is bizarre. GIFV isn't a new file format. It is just an alias for an existing format. The only reason the letters "GIF" are in this new file extension is to signal that the file was converted from a GIF, but who cares, apart from the so-called cultural connotations? I mean, does anybody care to have a BMPJ (a JPEG file that was converted from a BMP) or a WAV3 (an MP3 that was converted from a WAV)? Or a .GIFMP4GIFMP4GIFMP4 file, which was converted back and forth a few times?
- bhouston 12y agoThis is a marketing endeavor that is pretending to be a technical innovation.
- zobzu 12y agoYep. Plus gfycat.com does that since a while now, but imgur comes as "oh look we're so innovative". " Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations" Hi we put a .gifv extension to mp4 can we HTML5 standard this non standard file extension of a standard format?! Riite.
- gcb0 12y agoeven 4chan does that. whish tumblr implements it with standards and do a huge campaign calling imgur BS
- drawkbox 12y agoTwitter also followed the gfycat lead before imgur: http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-telling-you-about-gifs http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-tell... Glad imgur is doing it though, so annoying to have to wait for gifs in 2014 and they are intense bandwidth hogs.
- rohan1024 12y agoI think animated webp would have been a better choice.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jbk 12y agoWhy a new extension? Doesn't mp4 have enough extensions? .aac, .mp4, .m4a, .m4b, .mp4v, .m4p, .m4v, .mpeg4 so far. And now .gifv? I don't get it.
- u124556 12y agoA new extension everyone can use... https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y agoAs someone who runs a website with something similar, I'm hoping that Imgur is big enough to push for some open standards around this. I want embedding video to become as commonplace as embedding GIFs.
- tibiapejagala 12y agoWhat is the innovation here? Four mistakes in spelling 'webm'?
- sb057 12y agoNot hardly. This actually uses H.264, which in all regards is inferior to WebM's VP8.
- dzhiurgis 12y agoI propose a new format - GIFVGIF
- valarauca1 12y agoI think bhuston said it best. >This is a marketing endeavor that is pretending to be a technical innovation. Most of us are asking, why isn't it format X, or format Y. When they are clearly superior in quality and compression. The answer is they don't have marketing power. GIFV is directed at increasing attention to imgur. By trying to make more sites adopt it as their image/video hosting platform. Since imgur already has the size/market dominance to spread the GIFV platform. Increasing its chance of adoption. Rise above, support webm. Better compression, better quality, more wide spread.
- ubercow13 12y ago>Better compression, better quality this isn't true
- collypops 12y agoI can tell this thread is gonna be a gold mine for Shit HN Says
- lucian1900 12y agoThey also won't look like shit because of the limited colour range.
- karl_gluck 12y agoI'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet: why is imgur allowed to use copyrighted material to promote this new feature? I'm pretty certain they didn't get permission to use those clips from Tron or Star Wars. Does the fact that they were created by a user somehow give them immunity?
- bbayer 12y agoI think existing copyright law allows this kind of usage. Please refer to Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
- karl_gluck 12y agoThat's exactly my point -- (editing clarification) that the Copyright Act does not consider this fair use. From the article you referenced, "A key consideration is the extent to which the use is interpreted as <transformative>, as opposed to merely <derivative>." These are not parodies, being used for education or being used for critical analysis of the subject.
- Dylan16807 12y agoIt doesn't have to be. Parody and education are the situations where you can pretty much use the entire thing... but they're not using the entire thing.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jawns 12y agoNo immunity if you know it's copyrighted material and don't immediately remove.
- octo_t 12y agopart of the balancing test is the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; I don't think anyone can (reasonably) claim that a 10-20 second long clip (with no sound) is an any way a substantial portion of a ninety minute film.
- skellystudios 12y agoCan we all agree to pronounce it 'Jiffy' (gif 'V') and end the gif/gif thing forever.
- jcromartie 12y agoWhy can't we just deal with video without hiding it behind "GIF"?
- pjc50 12y agoGIF seems to have a better UX than video for its particular use case: inline, control-free, looping, audio-free.
- jcromartie 12y agoVideo can do that. In fact, video is doing this here.
- sergiotapia 12y agoSo this is why Imgur randomly started to output gifs with a .jpg extension. It broke my autogfy extension. :/
- anonfunction 12y agoRight after I finish my mp4 to gif shell script! https://github.com/montanaflynn/vidtogif https://github.com/montanaflynn/vidtogif
- brokentone 12y agoBeyond the webp/m debate that I'm sure will take place here adequately without my input: I think one of the bigger concerns these days with "short video clips on the web" - which is what we're all trying to solve with whatever technology - is workflow. People finally understand how to make gifs even if they're super low quality, or super large, then these poorly compressed "images" are being converted into various other things. If the tools were there to create audio-less MP4 / webp/m, that would help a lot.
- markbao 12y agoThe marketing here is a little disingenuous ("Imgur is reimagining the looping GIF video"), and a good number of Imgur users (those that have also used Gfycat, the intersection of which I presume are relatively dedicated users) will know it. Not a great move.
- hmage 12y agoTo all of you here asking 'why not webm?' consider this -- gfycat serves both webm and h264, I'm pretty sure imgur will add that in future, so no big deal. As for support, most of you are sitting on Chrome already, so you won't have any troubles playing h264. Cheers.
- gcb0 12y agothe good ol SF engineer bubble. it must be nice to live such a sheltered life. hint: if you only care about chrome users on every feature, and keep looking at you site access log to justify, you may find that there is a reason why your access log mostly have chrome user in the first place...
- aeturnum 12y agoI'm not sure what you're getting at. What video codec would you pick, and what does it have to do with the SF bubble? P.s. It is nice to live a sheltered life.
- shittyanalogy 12y agoPart of the reason GIFs are so popular is because of the limited colorspace. The new colorspace and compression sort of turn this into an entirely new medium not a better GIF. Other than the sometimes better filesize I don't really understand the appeal of any of this. Especially since support is far from that of GIF.
- gcb0 12y agoimgur manages to be behind even 4chan on featureset and performance... and now its behind on standards compliance also.
- chtoric 12y agothe link is down for me (it says page not found), here is the cached version from google http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aimgur.com%2Fblog%2F2014%2F10%2F09%2Fintroducing-gifv%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aimgur...
- GhotiFish 12y ago... I can't see their new format. I can't see mp4's. I'm using firefox. This is the future? great.
- whoopdedo 12y agoIt pushes a flash viewer to FF, even though I have a plugin that handles MP4.
- Mizza 12y agoI think this actually in response to Gyfcat, who have been doing this exact same thing for a while, and eating up quite a lot of imgur's redditshare: https://gfycat.com/ https://gfycat.com/
- hnha 12y agogfycat does "the right thing", they use the free and open webm format.
- IgorPartola 12y agoAnyone try to browse images on Imgur on iOS lately? I have. It's a huge pain because M4V videos take over the entire screen when they open. This looks great on a desktop browser where the videos play right on the page, but on iOS the experience is markedly worse than before. The videos load faster, but having to tap play, watching it loop, then tapping on the video again to bring up the header/footer, then tapping Done to stop the video... How is that better than just tapping Play? Now, I understand that this is an issue with iOS and not with Imgur, but honestly, GIFV is not a great improvement, technologically or otherwise. Also, note that most GIF's on Imgur end up there as screen caps of various web videos. In other words the process is now M4V -> GIF -> M4V. Instead, Imgur could just build tools for better short video creation that they could then host.
- leafo 12y agoI wrote a service in Go to transparently transcode gif to video that you might be interested in: https://github.com/leafo/gifserver https://github.com/leafo/gifserver
- ihaveajob 12y agoI clicked on this story hoping to find a clever alternative to the raster path for traversing images in GIF images, when used to compress video (highly correlated images). Something that preserves the spirit of GIF, but sucks less for what kids are using it online these days. Bummer.
- doodpants 12y agoGreat, a format for small embedded animations similar to GIFs, except that they cannot be stopped using the "Toggle animated GIFs" Firefox extension.
- AmericanOP 12y agoSurprised ctrl+f 'mobile' returns only one result.. gifv is broken for mobile. I have to click play, and it runs as a video. That is not gif UX.
- com2kid 12y agoI cannot right click and save an MP4 video in my browser. I cannot drag and drop it into an email. As a regular end user, I can use approved sharing features only. As a developer, yeah, I can download it myself and rehost it somewhere that hopefully supports MP4 video. The historical pissing match over how to best do animated PNG files is sad. An animated image format that is treated differently from videos is a nice thing to have. People have entire folders full of appropriate reaction GIFs. With how MP4 video is treated online today, such a thing is not possble.
- polarix 12y agoright click -> save works in chrome canary, 39.0.2163.3 at least. drag and drop does not, yet, but perhaps with this initiative it will be prioritized.
- epidemian 12y agoDragging&dropping the video from that page into an email (Gmail) on another tab worked as expected. Don't know if Gmail is doing something special though. I tried this on a desktop Firefox/Ubuntu. I'm actually quite surprised that it worked without any problems, considering the rough history of MP4 on Linux/OSS in general :D
- opendais 12y agoWell, someone is clearly feeling challenged by gfycat, mediacrush, etc. that did this for year(s).
- zxcvgm 12y agoI heard of a HTML5-based alternative some time ago called the "ugoira HTML5 zip player". It uses a ZIP file of PNG/JPG files and renders the animation using JavaScript onto a <canvas>. There's a detailed slide deck talking about it [1] and the source code is available too [2]. [1] https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/ https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/ [2] https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player
- sehugg 12y agoNo. Just no. These are muted videos, not GIFs. GIFs have an 8-bit palette. They're lossless. They are meant to be short and sweet, because they take up a lot of bits. They're also easy to manipulate, easy to encode/decode (I have a single .java file which generates animated GIFs) and unequivocally patent-free. Let us stand up against this subversion of the pure GIF format. [success_kid.gif]
- chuckreynolds 12y agowhoa nice
- passwordis 12y agonow deal with responsive images/videos
- reedlaw 12y agoAll I get is: Specified "type" attribute of "video/mp4" is not supported. Load of media resource http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.mp4 failed.
- mwfunk 12y agoThe reason Imgur is doing what they're doing makes sense (downloading animated GIFs is an absurd waste of bandwidth when people just want to see really short low-quality videos in their browsers). The way they're going about it and the way they're marketing the decision is arguably kinda silly. But the monocle-popping that is occurring in this thread is an order of magnitude sillier than anything Imgur is doing. This is really not worthy of the volume or intensity of the hand-wringing that is occurring in this thread. This is the type of news that you either ignore completely, or skim, nod, and move on. At worst it deserves some exaggerated eye rolling or a sarcastic joke to a cow-orker during lunch.