Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Convert online videos to .gif

studio.forgif.me

84 pointssgehlich39 comments

I really like the interface, it's very clever, only problem I'm having is you have the 5 second gif limit but that isn't explained anywhere and there's no indication of how long 5 seconds is on the timeline.

I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long have 50% of it grey.

I've used another site for this before (called Gifsoup: http://gifsoup.com/) and they charge about $5/m for the option to make longer gifs with no watermark, I think this would be something you could offer. I would definitely convert as I prefer your interface.

edit: The gif quality is pretty terrible, can that be improved?

edit edit: If you click "post to forgif.me" and then have to login and then login it loses the URL, you have to go back to find it again and click the button again.

Thanks for your suggestion, I really appreciate it! The idea of greying the indicator out is nice, I'll implement it tomorrow.

Yes, we were already thinking about providing such a premium service, we'll see what we can do. Right now it's just an experiment, let's hope it'll get bigger :)

Edit: We slice the video into frames by using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, the gif encoder of ffmpeg uses a pretty bad color palette, I already dived into the encoder code but didn't manage to improve it. I'll work on it though.

Edit edit: Yup, known issue, gotta fix that today!

Cofounder of GifSoup.com here (before we sold it off).

Prepare to have your bandwidth obliterated. You'll need to pay for way better hosting, people are literally going to hotlink you to death.

I'm not sure if your downloading process has a progress bar, but I suggest you implement one to keep impatient people from leaving (it looks like you do, but your server just might be unresponsive at the moment).

Your hosting bill is going to add up quick if you want to keep the service live and as is, so I suggest you implement a premium service. I don't think GIFs are a particularly profitable business, but we had fun with it, and its cool to see our watermarked GIFs on random places like Reddit. Enjoy!

Hey coryl, thanks for your feedback! The studio is just temporarily storing the files, they are automatically deleted after (currently) 24h. We will move this down to 60 minutes though.

As mentioned before, the server this beauty is running on is a very very small one, since we didn't expect such a huge feedback. We will move to another server later this week.

I've been running an online video converter for 5 years now, 300 TB of traffic per month (and the resulting video files are a lot bigger than the .gifs we are creating with this service), so I guess I'm quite experienced in handling huge amounts of traffic. As I see the stats on gifsoup.com, it had about 7TB traffic in total, which I think is nothing to worry about. Thanks for the hint, though :)

Glad to know you're well experienced, we sure weren't :)

If you would like to save bandwidth anyway, you could make the download link point to a data uri so that the users can only download the image. Might be a worse user experience though, if you think it's an OK use case to hotlink temporarily.

Is the name a recursive apology for its own terrible pun?

In that case it would be a great pun, wouldn't it?

I think it's more an apology for adding more GIFs to the Internet :)

Probably will be better to serve static content only by nginx. http://forgif.me/assets/132.gif error from rails.

maybe this will help http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with-rails/

Right now we don't have that much traffic, so we wouldn't see a big difference. We will configure nginx precisely when we move to another server, though.

Very nice! However, in its current implementation, the service does not seem to optimize the created gifs at all, i.e. all frames are opaque and do not try to reuse existing pixels in the last frame(s).

This can be easily changed by using the integrated disposal methods in a gif, as shown on http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm , but afaik ffmpeg does not support this out of the box.

It seems imagemagick is able to do some basic optimization, as shown on http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt .

I do like the interface, but in Firefox it's quit unresponsive and clunky, but a lot smoother in Safari. Either way, it was still quite difficult to actually find the start and end points I wanted. Not sure if this is something YouTube's end, like not allowing access to that certain point in the video.

I agree with other(s) when I say the quality is quite terrible, but hopefully some tweaks with FFMPEG, or maybe even another route.

I do like the neatness and unobtrusive-ness of the watermark though.

I think over all, it shows a lot of promise, but need to fine tune those UI controls and make it clearer/easier to select a timeframe, and improve the quality of the GIF somewhat too :)

Totally agreeing to the points you mentioned. At first we only had like one timeframe selector, but since videos can be pretty long, we added the zoom selection (the upper one), but it's quite hard to figure out how to handle them correctly. Actually you can use it very precisely if you know how.

I guess the first thing I will do is add an instruction video or a short tutorial to make clear what the controls are there for.

The problem with Firefox is that the videos we are getting from YouTube and Vimeo are MP4. Since Firefox does not support the h264 codec right now, I had to implement a flash fallback which is not responsive at all. I wonder why people still use Firefox, though :P

I'll take some time tomorrow to have a closer look at the gif encoding code of FFmpeg to make it use another color palette. This is quite complicated though, so it might take some time. For now, we have to consider ourselves satisfied with the quality :(

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!

Works pretty good: http://forgif.me/gm

Great tool! Is there a way to add static text?

The 2 usability recommendations I would add are:

1) Tell me how long my video clip is. (Don't make me keep guessing if I am in the 5 second range).

2) After creating the gif, if I don't like it let me go back to the editing screen with the last settings I used. I trimmed a youtube video down in the editor, but when the gif was created a few extra frames seemed to appear in the final product.

Yup, static text is one of the features we are planning for this tool. Currently we round the start and end time (which will be fixed tomorrow) so you won't get very precise results. Also, a "change settings" button will be implemented / we will load the given settings if you reopen the editor.

shameless plug. 4 months ago I released my own similar app. you can visit it here. http://99gifs.com/studio

Everything is done client side, it uses web workers to render the gif so it doesn't block the UI and it's fast.

The elements are a bit too small to get accurate results. An indicator for when the 5 second limit is reached would be appreciated. Also, please indicate how long I have to wait, it has been splitting video for a long time now.

Both things will be implemented! Thanks for your feedback!

Bug report: I made a gif and halfway through it cut to some other video. Weird. I couldn't pull any kind of unique identifier out of the page to show you, sorry.

Something like this here? http://forgif.me/hc I'll have a closer look at it when I'm at the office, thanks for the hint!

Should be fixed!

Sorry, the converter was totally broken for the last few hours. Result: Totally random .gifs. Fixed that, should work now.

You should post it on Reddit, as it will get lots and lots of usage there.

Somebody already did, it didn't get a lot of buzz though. Gotta try that later today!

I was looking for exactly something like this, really nice interface.

Thank you :)

It'll be great if uploading files are allowed.

Yup, that's another thing we are planning for the future. Thanks for your feedback!

Excellent work! Love this.

any desire to open source your video UI? it's terrific

How long should it take to split a video, I think it's been 5 minutes already, and it's still chugging away.

Yeah the server it's running on is pretty damn slow. We will move to another server in the next days. Unfortunately we don't show the progress of the video splitting right now. Try again if it takes to long. Sorry for that!

HN effect already, site down.

Fixed already, thanks for the comment though :)

Its very nice application

This is so cool. Hot Videos are so funnly :)

I'm sorry I mean gifs :)

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