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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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