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Comment by shabble | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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