Show HN: Put “GIF” in front of any YouTube URL and hit enter
gifyoutube.com
gifyoutube.com
What technology did you build this with? What do you use to decode videos and write out gifs?
Here's a useful bookmarklet to apply this to a video: javascript:location.host="gifyoutube.com"
EDIT: are you getting hammered by traffic right now? Because I tried this on a 15 second video, and it's been processing for ten minutes.
As per the edit - yeah a ton of traffic BUT generally right now 98% of GIFs are making. We have a known problem with vevo and other music videos though :(. If you post the YT link I can look into it and see if it's a traffic thing or just one that wouldn't work normally
Could someone maybe elaborate publically, it seems like something people are interested in :)
Shed some light in how you made everything. This is what interests us mostly.
1) youtube-dl ${video-id} video.avi #download youtube to avi
2) ffmpeg -i video.avi -t 10 out%02d.gif #export avi file to gif frames
3) gifsicle --delay=10 --loop *.gif > anim.gif #makes animated looping gif
Thanks! On that note, you'll want to handle fractional seconds for the annotations, or possibly frame numbers.
> I'll PM you about the tech ^_^
I look forward to it.
> As per the edit - yeah a ton of traffic BUT generally right now 98% of GIFs are making. We have a known problem with vevo and other music videos though :(. If you post the YT link I can look into it and see if it's a traffic thing or just one that wouldn't work normally
https://gifyoutube.com/watch?v=BNsrK6P9QvI
I don't know what you normally use to download videos, but you might try youtube-dl; it seems to work on just about everything, and you could script it.
I'll try to look into that problem :3. Nice to meet you btw ^_^
Some people use them all the time. And they don't have to be graphics, they can be done in text too. :]
javascript:location="http://gifyoutube.com"+location.pathname+location.search;
Btw: I find it nice that this tool supports https. pwnyoutube.com requires you to remove it manually, which makes it so much more inconvenient to use.
I'm not sure why you see the need to be so 'internet' with it all when you could do a fully functional equivalent that would be easier on your servers too. Just make it clean and usable and it'll be far better.
We were just being silly and hacking away at it adding random things that made us lol hahaha.
You're right though. Moving forward minimalist is what we hope to accomplish.
Thanks for the feedback ^_^
I cannot think of a target demographic who would use the site in its current incarnation but would not if it were a cleaner, simpler, "less /b/-inspired" design. I can however think of a demographic who wouldn't use the site unless it were cleaner.
edit: This sounds like A/B testing 101 to me.
But great tool nonetheless. Props to you!
Took like 15 seconds to make http://share.gifyoutube.com/lcD.gif (a game-winning shot from a couple seasons back).
http://phatgifs.com/?v=http%3A%2F%2Fshare.gifyoutube.com%2Fl...
Will definitely change in the next update. I was thinking maybe a very small change just for the lols- like a cloud just drifting by
I made quietyoutube.com (put 'quiet' in front of any youtube video) and get a page of just the video, nothing else. I made it a couple years arg. Shame I can't get the SSL cert, though the bookmarklet I made works well enough.
mkgif.com
gifjam.com
gifit.org
gifr.info
gifry.net
yougif.net or .org
Also, you can still keep your url-based usability with a name like this. Instead of telling people "just add gif to the beginning of the domain", tell them "just add .gifjam.com to the end of the domain". Bonus: you can then easily extend to other video sites.
Maybe we should reverse that?
And from a more marketing side of things
If you went gif first and five months down the line announcing support for webm makes you look innovative and will probably get you posted to a handful of subreddits and the front page of hn.
If you went webm first and five months down the line announce gif support, you probably won't be able to achieve the same results.
It's a little conflicting because I love HN and reddit, so my* general preferences differ from what I think is actually the best transition :3
Do you think it's worthwhile? If not, why?
[1] https://blog.mediacru.sh/2014/07/12/State-of-MediaCrush-2014...
Fuck GIF; just because the patent expired doesn't mean we should use this piece of shit (by modern standards) format for things it was never really intended for and for which there are far better solutions, like just linking to the actual video.
Full circle!
Also, I'm super excited that something I made a long time ago prompted someone else to make something waaaaay more awesome.
Question, you asked about using Gunicorn in our conversation, is this written in Python or is it written using something else? I'm really curious about the technologies you use to make this work!
Also of note, why do you ask for a title? I don't see it on the resulting gif page: https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/lP1
Damn this is actually great. We messaged a few people asking to help cut times (which was my biggest pet peeve). No one ever came through :').
For the title, it's just something we're testing out. I love scrolling through the DB etc, and a title makes me laugh ahaha. Maybe we can use it in a future thing?
I'm gonna text you ^_^
http://phatgifs.com/?v=http%3A%2F%2Fshare.gifyoutube.com%2Fl...
Feature request: please enable preview of youtube loop right in your url like gifyoutube.com/y0ut0oo0biD&loop=123.4;5.67 where first number is 'start time' then second number is 'length'. And allow millisecond specification.
File size could be smaller? EG 0.14 second frames instead of 0.08, longer duration frames aren't too noticable and may cut bulky GIF sizes almost in half.
File size is something we want to do as well. Working with smallest webm available, but still want the gif size to be smaller
One thing that's difficult is choosing the finishing time on the video. For example if it's 5 seconds or something, the two end points are really close.
What do you think about beta.gifyoutube.com? It's a little different mechanics for choosing start time (which I'm not the best fan of), but maybe it's a little easier for end time.
I'm actually not really sure on this. We were going to try some A|B testing but the beta GYT isn't 100% ready
I couldn't test it because the video didn't load. I saw the beta UI once (two slice bars), but when I reloaded, the video didn't appear. (I tested IE11 and Chrome)
Another small UI complain. If I type in the text box the YouTube address and I hit the enter key, it doesn't get to the edit page. I have to reach for my mouse, and click in the green "Create Gif" button.
Nice useful tool.
you could argue that if you really cared you'd just use a GIF editor to "trim" the final result to your liking, but would be nice not to have this step.
https://bgrins.github.io/videoconverter.js
It's quite bruteforce and it is a really large javascript file, however you could leave out all the unneeded codecs for reducing the size. Also you could first preprocess the video on server side (clipping the time interval, maybe resizing) and only leave the gif encoding to the client.
One issue I see is when someone uses the same word as title, no one else can use it (as opposed to a number-based titling system where no one would care if /90289432 was in use). Also someone else can peruse other people's gifs by just checking random titles (perhaps a non-issue, though).
GIFhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Which doesn't work. I am amazed that Google hasn't complained about the gifyoutube.com domain.
But one key feature for me would be the ability to add text to various frames/time ranges. That would make creating GIFs that actually say stuff you can read much easier.
The text thing was going to be our next update mwahahahhaha. Great idea thank you
I'm actually surprised now too :O
Surface UI really does make all the difference.
Interestingly, makeagif also has trouble with vevo vids.
Trouble with vevo vids is in the DL. Vevo does some funky stuff :[
http://phatgifs.com/?v=http%3A%2F%2Fshare.gifyoutube.com%2Fl...
This seems a perfect match for my audio/video mashupper! It could accept YouTube as video source, but despite my efforts, often gifs still sync better than youtube's quirky player as they are converted to webm automatically.
<font color="#AAAAAA">/watch?v=QgaTQ5-XfMM</font>
how does one go about deciding to use such markup?
But seriously, if I wanted to add an html tag from 1996 to my site, where is the best place to look for one on the world wide web?
:)
What are you using for the queue?
I'm not 100% sure if youtube minds. Someone from youtube actually put it on one of their videos (a button for it), and then said youtube community department were having fun and spreading it around
We don't use a 3rd party queueing software ^_^.
Maybe giftube.com or yougif.com?
I'd register those but keep what you currently have for now. Being able to say "put the word gif in front of any youtube url" is just great for user experience.
We will give you a free premium listing on BootName.com if you want community support to find a name.
My (unsolicited) layman's take:
Someone from youtube != Google's legal department, which makes this situation both awesome and sad. If Google wishes to maintain their ownership of the youtube trademark, legally they must enforce their ownership of it (which means either granting you a license, or sending you a C&D). That said, I'd search around for trademark licensing info - they may have an existing license which covers this use.
In the mean time you may be able to protect yourself a little by adding some text that says that YouTube is a legally registered trademark of Google, Inc., and this site is not affiliated with Google in any way.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems one could easily argue that an "idiot in a hurry" might confuse this for youtube. Which is sort of what the threshold is for this sort of thing nowadays. So, yea, start thinking about a domain that doesn't include youtube
Do you have plans to monetize it? How are you paying for the hosting.
Do you scrape the whole video, or just the part requested? And is the conversion to gif a library or something you wrote?
I'm totally ignorant when it comes to scraping videos and converting them, but I find it interesting.
Sure! I will email you about this :D. Cheers
Also, why don't you throw Adsense on this page?
EDIT: The emoticons in your comment replys