Apple releases a bit of code to let you put Live Photos on your sites
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Also no android version seems quality folks just seems like another app that won't survive till the next year
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...
> Also no android version
Does Android support the Apple Live Photo format?
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.and...
What is this even supposed to be beyond webm/gifv anyways?
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.
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.
Keep in mind that you need enough value gain for them to invest the engineering and silicon in hardware webm decoding rather than everything else they're doing.
No. That doesn't even make sense. WebM is a video format, it competes with h.264/h.265.
Further it's incorrect that they don't allow webm, what they don't is implement and support it — I assume because they already have hardware-accelerated codecs which they're invested in and thus have little use for webm — third-party video players can support webm just fine (VLC supports it AFAIK)
> What is this even supposed to be beyond webm/gifv anyways?
It's metadata-information on a picture, the main media is a regular photograph (in full quality) and the "live" part is surrounding information (in lower video-level quality) and really quite nice, it provides a loop of live context (the "live" video is 1.5s before and after) for the picture.
There's nothing special at the technical level, it's just a video file next to or embedded in the picture file.
Yes, it makes plenty of sense. If WebM were available on iOS, this new "feature" would not exist. There would be a million 3rd party apps already doing this. Apple simply wants to lock things down purely for profit.
>It's metadata-information on a picture, the main media is a regular photograph (in full quality) and the "live" part is surrounding information (in lower video-level quality) and really quite nice, it provides a loop of live context (the "live" video is 1.5s before and after) for the picture.
You've just described WebM
It would exist in the exact same way. Again, webm is a video codec, it competes with h.264/h.265 which is only a sub-component of a "live photo".
> There would be a million 3rd party apps already doing this.
There could already be a million 3rd party apps doing this using h.264. Hell there could already have been a million 3rd party apps doing this before 2015.
Yet there are not.
> You've just described WebM
Only if you are either completely addled or thoroughly dishonest.
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.
Works fine in Safari :)
Edit: Can confirm it's very twitchy and jumpy in Firefox on macOS. The photo and video switches place every few hundred milliseconds.
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!
— 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...
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.
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...
Oh, that's right, iOS doesn't even support WebM let alone let you export Live Photos as WebM (or MP4 for that matter). That you need a third-party app to share Live Photos with anything other than another iOS device is pretty shameful.
How is this argument not dead yet…
I'd love to do something with this, but without a simple (and preferably scriptable) way to remove the audio I probably won't...
As you can see, the text selection pop up is visible while playing the Live Photo.
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).
What exactly is an Apple site?
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.
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.
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.
This was true of gif until the mid 2000s, well after it became popular.
Is it still around? Vast majority of "GIFs" from gfycat and imgur are now served as MP4. I rarely encounter GIFs anymore.
However I don't think apple ever intended Live Photos to be a replacement for gifs. They're just a fun little feature that works well within the context of taking photos with a cell camera.
Respectfully, I don't think Apple makes fun little business decisions either.
There are lots of fun little features in iOS.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
They'd open the App Store on their iPad, browse for an app, and iCloud will install it across all their devices.
Possibly unrelated, but did you find a way around having to install XCode before being able to install Homebrew?
xcode-select --install
It's definitely no Google Play Store, but as a general App Store search alternative I like https://fnd.io/ as it's a bit more web friendly. Unfortunately, you still need to jump into the App Store/iTunes to actually download anything.
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.
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?
Anyone can feel free to correct me.
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".
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-c...
* Stupid patent, demonstrating once again the insanely broken to death patent system
* Proprietary technology used for an animated GIF
* Top on hacker news
Just so you know, the actual spelling is beaucoup.