Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

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> It really was a scratch your own itch kind of thing.

I agree. They make it look lucky because they executed so well. Good entrepreneurs have a habit of making it look easy to outsiders (Zuck was lucky because he was at Harvard and had the right connections, etc.)

There is a new problem of this type at reddit and other sites if somebody wants a project idea to work on. The problem is animated GIF's. At the moment most animated GIF's are too large, not optimized and the sites are slow.

This has been a constant long-term complain on some of the sports subs that I frequent that post highlights from games. You press the button to display the animated GIF inline and it loads a couple of frames a second and takes 10-30x the GIF length to load. There are two factors here:

1. A lot of people don't know how to optimize animated GIF's. You don't need 24 or 30 frames per second where 8 will suffice, and you don't need full image quality on mobiles or tablets, or even on desktops. You can cut down the frame rate automatically and scale up the compression for some clients to load faster.

2. A lot of the regular hosts are overloaded and slow.

A service idea for animated GIF's would be to specify a video to cut from then have the service automatically create and load desktop, mobile and tablet versions with low frame rates and hosted from a decent CDN. The regular posters are now using Google+ since it loads, but they haven't solved the optimization part.

You don't have to spend a lot of time online to see and identify these pain points, you just have to be in the right mindset where you notice them and can identify the opportunity.

edit: If anybody wants to do this, email me (in profile) and i'll send you my notes. It is something that I considered putting together but I don't have the time. I did do some research though (i'm a mod at some sports subs). If you serve optimized versions for different devices then that would be a good reason to get submissions linking to an HTML page rather than hot-linking to an image.

Pipeline would be:

    upload video -> convert to 3 optimized version -> visitor lands on your HTML page -> serve version based on UA

running these services isn't as expensive as what it used to be, CND's are now cheap. imgur is profitable with 12 staff and running on AWS, with no ads.

No idea if it's technically possible, although it really feels like it should be, but for me the biggest single improvement a site could do to animated gifs would be to allow at least basic video controls - particularly pause or step backwards.

I hate watching a 30 second animated gif where the fancy skill or whatever that it's trying to show is about 2 seconds long and I have to keep looping round and round again to try to catch the critical moment.

Maybe it's already out there somewhere, but I've not seen it.

http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/‎ ?

404 Not Found

A lot of people got all excited when sites like YouTube and Vimeo added support for HTML5 video, believing the <video> element was The Future Of Special Sites You Visit To Watch Videos. Given that YouTube still uses Flash exclusively for a whole lot of content, I'm not sure that's going to work out.

On the other hand, I believe the <video> element could be The Animated GIF Killer. GIF compression is terrible especially for video, and I'm sure with some tweaking of compression options you could make a .mp4 video with higher quality and a fraction of the size of the equivalent .gif. If there were some site like Imgur that let you upload some small video fragment, let you do the appropriate timeline snips, and automatically created a nice small .mp4 and a fallback .gif, that would be truly excellent.

Give it a maximum video length of 10 or 20 seconds and pre-load the site with a bunch of the more popular reaction GIFs like the Picard Facepalm and Orson Wells clapping, and you should be good to go.

EDIT: Looks like https://mediacru.sh/ does at least the GIF->MP4 encoding, although it misses imgur's handy "here's how to use this on your site" examples.

> and I'm sure with some tweaking of compression options you could make a .mp4 video with higher quality and a fraction of the size of the equivalent .gif.

No tweaking needed. Test it yourself: Download any of those huge gifs and encode it to h.264 with ffmpeg defaults. With no perceptive quality loss it's immediately 60-90% smaller. And then h.265 comes along soon.

Vine and its competitors offer this kind of HTML5 video fragments.

And you constantly see posts on reddit where the Vine video was turned into a gif, uploaded to ingur, and shared.

I never understood that. You'd think that reddit users are savvy enough to adopt html5 video. RES could just as readily inline video as they do animated GIFs, and we would all save a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

The advantages of animated GIFs made sense pre-video tag.

It's probably more of a perception thing than anything else. An animated GIF feels like a lot less overhead than a full on video, even if the file itself is smaller as a video.

Also user forums like reddit are a lot more likely to permit images in posts than a video tag, so you get the added portability of being able to post it almost everywhere.

Vine videos only reliably load for me on Chrome. They're almost totally broken on every other browser.

Except part of the reason GIFs are popular is that everything at least sort-of supports them, even Internet Explorer 4.

I expect that will be a common belief long after it ceases to be a true belief. There's still people that avoid PNGs because "they don't work properly in Internet Explorer" but most vaguely web-savvy people wouldn't bat an eyelid at a PNG today. I want the same thing to happen for HTML5 video: the latest version of every major browser supports it, including Internet Explorer, and including mobile browsers; the biggest limitation I can think of is forum software that doesn't yet have <video> on its whitelist, but time (and a bit of targeted complaining) should solve that too.

In case anyone is wondering; this guide does wonders with GIF size reduction: http://blog.room208.org/post/48793543478

It helped me to go from 6 MB to 100 KB for my specific type of video to animated GIF conversion.

So it's funny you outlined exactly what I created 2 years ago. I have all the code for uploading videos or gifs, running them through a combination of Imagemagick and ffmpeg to generate mp4/webm videos and image spritesheets for mobile devices. The only hitch now is probably the big cost of running these libraries on elastic computing services. ffmpeg is a beast, and it'll probably cost quite a bit of money to handle all the transcoding.

It's interesting that you say that. Not to long ago I built something kinda like that for gifs because eof exactly what you said: it wasn't easy enough to make them. So, I built http://gifmachine.xwl.me to scratch that itch. It works using youtube videos as input, so you only have to have a url to get started.

A friend of mine is working on http://www.giflike.com/

It's "like animated gifs", but implemented with JPEGs + javascript. JPEG encoding is much more efficient for photos, and doing the animation in javascript enables fun features such as reversing and scrolling through frames in the browser.

So, he is reinventing MJPEG, in Javascript...

I can't find the proper words to comment this.

How about "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"? :)

There was a codec in the mid-90s that porn sites and some illegal warez groups used that was essentially this. At the time your options were either AVI or a very expensive commercial solution, so someone came up with splitting video files into JPEG's and streaming them over the web and using javascript to slice them back together.

I remember watching star wars on one of the earliest web streaming sites - the image was around 150x150px and would refresh once per second. It was still the most awesome thing I had ever seen at the time, though.

It was probably multipart/x-mixed-replace, rather than javascript.

Imgur has ads unless you're a pro member.

Just want to point out that when hotlinking to an image you can still serve seperate versions depending on the user agent.

Pretty sure imgur doesn't run on aws and does have ads.

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