Hacker News Reader

Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

reddit video is complete garbage though

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.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com