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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Can’t insert ads into GIFs easily. On video it’s trivial.

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.

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.

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.

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-o...).

I think the black box just means that the first frame is black

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.

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.

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.

I give it about 50-50 odds that doing this doesn't kill it but relegates it to irrelevancy, like Photobucket and similar.

Almost every image I see on Reddit uses imgur, and some subreddits have an explicit ban on using Reddit image hosting for some reason.

reddit video is complete garbage though

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.

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.

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

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.

I've found it perfectly serviceable. Especially when youtube is blocked by corporate policy.

What corporate policy blocks Youtube but not Reddit? :)

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.

what's the difficulty in splicing in some additional frames at upload or request-time? From what I vaguely recall of the format it's essentially a stream of stream of independent frames with some timing info, although there might be something about colour palette selection? I'm sure there could be something that makes it especially horrible, but curious what it is :-)

Isn't video advertising mostly handled at a higher layer by sticking some segments into the playlist/container rather than actually encoding it into a single video unit anyway?

GIF is only 256 colours, so the renderer optimises the living daylights out of the palette to make things look vaguely uncrappy. Any ad inserted would have to only use those colours (which are then very different from GIF to GIF). That's a tough sell for brand graphic designers. GIFs are also often short loops, breaking the loop with an ad, especially when inserted automatically, will break a high number, if not most, of the good GIFs in circulation. Doing anything dynamically also breaks caching which is probably undesirable when most of your business is pumping dumb bytes around the net.

Finally, you can't add a link. I guess it's still useful for brand advertising, but I suspect that's less valuable than the kind where you can directly track conversions.

You can use 256 colors per-frame, as well as using transparancy. Also, each frame is just a diff from the previous frame's content. So it's not unreasonable, just pointless when video formats are so good.

Imgur doesn't use gifs. They transcode to mp4 and webm.

They do still use .gif in some cases

>what's the difficulty in splicing in some additional frames at upload or request-time?

Are you aware of the CPU overhead and lag time involved with just "splicing in some additional frames" to a video file within the context of an HTTP request cycle?

obviously it's not going to be free, I was more curious what made it specifically 'more difficult than video'.

I'd hope there would be some opportunity for caching to make it a bit cheaper than every single request, but maybe with dynamic targeted or real-time ad bidding that wouldn't work so well.

Maybe w MJPEG.

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