Show HN: Create beautiful animated gifs of your apps | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Create beautiful animated gifs of your apps

appgif.net

49 pointssloankev18 comments

Try HTML5 video instead. GIFs are archaic, low quality, and missing on features.

MediaCrush converts GIFs to video, and will host straight video files. It's open source, you might gain something from browsing the code.

https://mediacru.sh

https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush

You're right, thanks for the advice, I'll look into a video option!

except GIFs are everywhere.

GIFs are a nice compatibility fallback, but HTML5 video should be used where possible. I think that http://gfycat.com/about does this well.

Not as well as the site I linked in my comment ;)

Doesn't really make sense for his product, given that he scrolls through a series of screenshots. If he was recording a casting demo, then it might.

Forget the stigma that videos have to be paired with audio. A video is a convenient means of making a moving picture. They're easier on bandwidth, higher quality, and more flexible.

I like HTML5 vids-as-gifs, but gifs still have some upside. Gifs are still more portable and distributable. In this instance, bandwidth and probably negligible given that there's so few frames in the gif.

Portability isn't a concern here. Realistically, an extremely small fraction of your users have unsupported browsers. Maybe some forums won't let you embed video, but if you're building a product site you have the freedom to use whatever you please.

Wouldn't it be nice if your marketing wasn't covered in artifacts? Every GIF on this page is full of artifacts. Would it be valuable for users to be able to pause and appreciate a feature they think is neat?

It's high time for GIFs to die. HTML5 video is a worthy replacement.

Here. Here. This site just needs the option to outport as WebM.

I was also thinking that it would be negligible for slideshow gifs, but the iPhone example went from a 1.5MB gif to a 500KB WebM. Using video means you also remove the 8-bit color restriction that is imposed on gifs. (without hacks, at least)

A GIF will play in an email. Unfortunately embedding a video in an email is still not widely supported.

And with good reason. I would immediately mark any email that moved as junk.

I wasted more than 3 hours to create a animation on how to use the web app that I was working on. recorded my screeen using Simgle Screen Resorder [1] .

Converted the recorded video into several images using avconv [2] something like this

  avconv -i  00:00  1.mkv -t 15 op/frame_%03d.jpg

Create a gif using ImageMagick Convert Command-Line Tool [3]

  convert -resize 427x240 op/frame_*.jpg op.gif

Result is 20 mb GIF image.. I had to reduce the frames and some other parameters to reduce the size.

I feel HTML5 video is a better alternative, but I still need a gif.

[1] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/12/simple-screen-recorder-li...

[2] https://libav.org/avconv.html

[3] http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php

Hi there. I have found this quite useful. Was just wondering if there was a reason why there is no more than 5 images supported? The webapp says it is getting 6 files but it doesn't display any when I select 6 images, 5 seems to be the max.

The images you're displaying on the homepage are downscaled by the browser and look horrible. You see this most in small lines, e.g. the carrier name. You should generally not be producing a single high-resolution GIF but instead a suite of appropriately scaled and resampled images.

Any plans to support Android devices?

Yes, absolutely. I just wanted to make sure people were interested in the tool before I put more work into it.

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