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Comment by moot | Hacker News Reader

More details here: http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan

Hey, could I suggest something? For the inline expansion, it would be neat if it played automatically without needing to click, just like an animated GIF:

  <video src="blah" autoplay loop controls>

You could also maybe hide the controls, they can be distracting (you could always add an option to enable them):

  <video src="blah" autoplay loop>

EDIT: Thanks for fixing it!

What other reasons were there to limit videos to 2 minutes, without audio? They certainly aren't technical limits.

The commons reasons cited on 4chan are:

1. All videos with sound would be "screamers", where the audio would get really loud unexpectedly halfway through, as a simple troll.

2. 4chan is an _image_ board, not a video board.

3. the MPAA and other copyright holders would crush 4chan with DCMA takedown requests for audio.

I feel like (1) could be solved technically with auto-mute and/or a soundcloud-style visible meter, as well as the novelty eventually wearing off.

For (2), it seems that 4chan's main goal of ephemeral content/anonymity would overrule the historical precedent for content on the site (and already does, if /f/ is any indication). If it works for vine/snapchat, why not 4chan?

(3) though seems like the major issue, especially for +2 minute videos.

>as well as the novelty eventually wearing off.

You haven't been on 4chan much, have you? I can promise you it would never get old. Anyway, what 4chan wants is basically better GIFs.

>what 4chan wants is basically better GIFs.

_And_ sound, as evidenced by anybody who posts links to youtube or soundcloud, e.g., /a/ or /mu/. Having such functionality directly in 4chan uploads would further the goal of anonymous ephemerality/content creation better than links to other sites. I can see your point if by "4chan" you mean "moot and site admins" due to the copyright concerns, but my feeling from other anons is that audio support would be awesome overall.

>You haven't been on 4chan much, have you?

If the novelty truly never wore off, every gif would still turn into cheetus after the first frame, and every link to youtube would still be Rick Astley.

Plus, think of your argument if we already had audio webms for their legitimate uses and had never known restriction. Would you give up audio on all webms just because of an occasional "screamer"? Would you give up all images just because some anons occasionally post shock pictures?

> as evidenced by anybody who posts links to youtube or soundcloud

Or people who post images that have audiodata hidden in them in increasingly sophisticated and hard to detect ways. /v/, /a/ and /mu/ have semi-regular sounds threads. I'm certain people will find a way to embed sound in video files in ways that can't be detected and update the media extension to handle those. We will have sounds one way or another.

>If the novelty truly never wore off, every gif would still turn into cheetus after the first frame, and every link to youtube would still be Rick Astley.

These examples aren't actually gone, you know? Less common, certainly, but these trolling-memes don't really die out until there's something new to replace their exact use-case.

Clearly the better URL for HN, so I changed it.

Thanks Dan!

You probably know this but the blog breaks with https everywhere.

Tumblr doesn't support HTTPS, unfortunately. HTTPS Everywhere will need to update the 4chan config to account for it.

Are you going to be using this tumblr blog instead of /news from now on?

Not instead of, but in addition to: http://blog.4chan.org/post/81891220996/reintroducing-the-4ch...

Moot, fix the mime type of those pages. On Android it opens the new url on the browser and only when the browser got the file header it calls the video app to start the download again. I'm pretty sure there are ways for the link to go directly to the video app

We already send the proper MIME type:

  Content-Type: video/webm

Android is dumb then... Not surprised.

IIRC Android matches on the file extension in the URL...

Looks like they are in a freeze period waiting for a stable release and won't touch any rules for the time being. Happy regular expression fun times ahead.

I think it'll be in the new release; there was a ruleset freeze to work out kinks for quite some time.

Nice to see this rolled out. In the notes it's mentioned that you won't offer a fallback. Was this a bandwidth consideration or that you decided simply not to try and support the remaining 14%? Or that you didn't want to maintain the infrastructure for transcoding the fallback file. In my experience at work I've found that whilst webm is generally smaller the difference is minute especially when you are dealing with files as small as 3MB.

We don't have the resources to support transcoding, and since so much of our userbase is on browsers that support it I don't think we would regardless.

Not sure how you're going to solve the WebM hosting issues, but I would be really curious to see a list of issues large sites like 4chan have. I think me and other people would surely like to solve such «sysadmin/developer puzzles» for fun.

WebP is larger than APNG [1] and is supported more widely according to the following table [2]. There is a way to add compatibility to older browser too [3]. Other than that, there are also Opera [4] and Chrome [5] extensions for APNG.

Update: Found a successful APNG kickstarter campaign, which lists some interesting APNG tools and libraries. [6]

Also just tested myself how the filesize compares for different file formats able to host animated content for this source image [7].

     gif    – 679,6 Kb
     apng   – 547,1 Kb
     mp4    – 273,8 Kb
     webp   – 618,9 Kb

(sorry, have no webm converter here)

---

[1] http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp.html

[2] http://caniuse.com/apng

[3] http://davidmz.github.io/apng-canvas/

[4] https://addons.opera.com/de/extensions/details/apng/?display...

[5] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apng/ehkepjiconegk...

[6] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374397522/apngasm-foss-...

[7] http://37.media.tumblr.com/70a88618cc58ac5ad670ab175f8a1419/...

WebP/M and H.264 are lossy formats, so any comparison citing one ultimate filesize for them is nonsensical.

I'd expect them to beat PNG with acceptable quality, since PNG's compression (gzip with some prefilters to make image data more gzippable) is the work of someone either limited by patents or not informed enough to make their own entropy coder.

Also try 'ffv1' in ffmpeg; it's lossless and will win every time.

Lossy and lossless.

Transcode a bunch of different-looking PNGs to a WebP losslessly, each pixel preserved exactly, and you'll see a byte savings in the neighborhood of 30%. Go lossy and much more savings, with the option of alpha transparency on lossy if you're into that.

It's not just efficiency, it's versatility that these formats bring to the table. Though the efficiency is compelling.

Why isn't it possible to play the video inline?

Click settings, then choose Inline Expansion or Image Hover.

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