GIF export in Snipping Tool begins rolling out to Windows Insiders | Hacker News Reader

GIF export in Snipping Tool begins rolling out to Windows Insiders

blogs.windows.com

16 pointstaubek27 comments

> In this update, we are adding GIF export for screen recordings – designed to boost your productivity and turn quick captures into shareable moments.

It is very funny that this article about a new way to do screen recordings documents how to use the feature without using a screen recording.

This is going to be very useful for tech support. You can create a quick "tutorial" and paste it in Slack, Teams, etc.

The snipping tool in Windows 11 can already record videos. I just copied the result and then pasted it in Telegram, it worked great and can handle more than 256 colors. I guess having gif support for those who need it is better than not having it, but I don't see why it would be better than the current video format.

I don't even know which format they use at the moment when copying to the clipboard, but when saving as a file it's saved as an mp4 file using aac for audio and h.264 for video.

Sounds a bit like the old Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) tool in Windows. It was a little known tool that recorded keystrokes/clicks/screenshots, which was great for troubleshooting.

Sadly, the screenshots were all lossy jpegs, and it wrapped the whole thing into an mhtml file.

Still waiting for the QR code reader in SnippingTool (or PowerToys).

You may already know about it but I'll recommend it regardless just in case anybody else has never seen or heard about it.

ShareX: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX

Is a phenomenal, Open Source (GPL3) screenshot utility for windows that absolutely kicks ass. Slices, dices, reads qrcodes, uploads to custom s3 locations, captures video, the list of it's features is long.

are we going back in time? gif should've been gone years ago

Why? Gifs are by far the most efficiency way to playback micro length video. As in it uses the least amount of processing power due to not being encoded and instead just being a series of images.

unefficient*, especially when putting actual video into gif format. most often those gifs are hideous (limited color palette etc) and huge (10+ MB for seconds of video), often either badly optimized (which would only make them look even more crunchy) or not optimized at all. gifs are just straightforwardly worse there (in quality and size). gifs are useful for having some graphics with transparency (if you don't mind crunchy one bit transparency), but there are much better formats (webp/webm, apng, etc) with much better 8-bit transparency too. seriously, people need to give it up and put video in a video format. like h264, which is gonna be widely compatible and likely hardware accelerated. (possibly performing better than huge gifs as well, hw accelerated or not)

I'm talking about cpu efficiency, not storage space. Video encoding is made to reduce storage at the cost of cpu.

But as long as software treats all video formats like a video with the ability to pause and has a seek bar instead of just being an image then there is still a use case for formats like gif. If everything supported apng that would be great, but almost nothing does. Also for some reason every image I save from the net that claims to be an animated webp gets saved as a gif. I'm not sure why that is, but it doesn't seem like it needs to be that way.

h264 was accelerated somewhere around geforce 6 series in 2004

Indeed - you don't even need to store full frames, sometimes changes are enough. I managed to compress the entirety of the Bad Apple!! video into a 64x32px GIF -taking up 813 KiB.

Seriously, they often look terrible due to the limited palette and the file size blows up very quickly unless you severely constrain the dimensions.

I for one, having grown up on 8 bit 1200 baud BBS porn, find error diffusion dithering quite beautiful.

Yoot Tower - Every Movie Theater Clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8o7gg87k4

>This is a montage of all of the theater clips from the PC game Yoot Tower, a sequel to Maxis's SimTower that was developed by the same team. These movies would play when you examined a theater location playing said films.

SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI

>Chill Resolve by Jerry Martin. Space Inventory performed by Don Hopkins with Micropolis.

https://micropolisweb.com/

Generally I agree, but there have been some rare occasions where I needed a gif of a screen recording. In that case, finding a nice way to convert was pretty painful, without using any of those online converters.

I'd use ImageMagick.

or ffmpeg.

But having a nice tool on any (windows) computer where you can just press WIN + Shift + S (or PrtSc?) and record a image/video/gif to paste it straight into another app like a chat is very convenient.

They had to wait until there was consensus on how to pronounce it.

The IEEE GIF Pronunciation Standard took decades to get through committee!

30 years late!

Imagine being on the Snipping Tool team. Good grief, they must have it made...

Can you elaborate on that? Are you saying that most people would not enjoy working on a smaller and simple tool?

I like that the snipping tool is build into windows. Took a while, but I use it weekly.

I think OP is referring to the adding something so old to the tool this late.

OP is referring to the fact that to work in so small and out-of-the-way a one, among the 'many mansions of Microsoft's house,' must be in many ways the best of all worlds.

I wish they would try harder. Not yet on this GIF release, but the new Win11 era snipping tool is horribly slow compared to the legacy one. I used to be able to hit the keyboard shortcut and have it appear instantly. There is now a several second pause before the tool is ready to use. Have missed several screen grabs I wanted to capture of a live presentation.

I haven't used Windows since 7. But you could probably extract that version of the tool from an unpacked install ISO and see if you'd be able to use it instead, though no doubt a little less conveniently. Does AutoHotkey still work for rebinding most Win key combos?

Heh. I have definitely thought about that (same with legacy paint!). Unfortunately, it is a corporate PC, and I am not sure how that would go to be loading “untrusted” files. My suspicion is that the current release is labeled as a protected system file, so I could not overwrite it. Which means the hard coded shortcut combination would continue to launch the slow, bloated one. So, yeah definitely less convenient.

Slightly. If it's Win+C for a screenshot and Win+Shift+C is unbound, then you should be able to use AHK to bind it to launch the old binary, so at least you only have to modify muscle memory already extant.

That assumes DWM doesn't own the whole Win key now and that you can run signed but not specifically approved binaries. But like I said, it's been a long time since I was acquainted with Windows and I don't think I've lacked for at least local admin on a work machine since some time in the very early 2000s, so my advice is likely not worth much.

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