Some email clients support animated gifs embedded in the main email content. None that I currently use, but I do remember it as a feature in Outlook 2003.
Absolutely! We actually made a webm version (that's the smallest size to date and the fastest to create), but just wanted to perfect GIF creation and get some captions on the system early before introducing webm.
It depends, who is your actual target audience? If it's a general anyone and everyone, gif is the way to go. If it's a more technical audience, who probably know what webm already is, then webm may make more sense
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.
If you want to convert GIFs to WebM/MP4/etc you might want to check out the MediaCrush[1] code. Or just use https://mediacru.sh, which is and always will be free.
Another mediacrush guy here - jdiez went to sleep. Us devs hang out in #mediacrush on irc.freenode.net and we also read emails sent to {jdiez,drew}@mediacru.sh
We haven't looked much into WebP as an animation container. And since it's only supported by Chrome (and will likely remain that way) we are not currently considering it. WebM and MP4 both have pretty good codecs for video; definitely a lot better than GIFs, that's for sure.
Thank you for using MediaCrush! We publish regular transparency reports[1] about several things, including our finances. We don't have any seed money, it's just coming out of our own wallet.
If you'd like to set up a recurring donation, then yes, Gittip is the easiest way to do it. That said, we're not picky about donations; we'll accept pretty much every payment method or barter.
I just call those two SafarIE. Safari is shaping up to be the new IE so we might as well just say them in one phrase instead of always specifying them both.
I like that you can choose the starting time directly in the video. But I'd like to choose the finishing time in the video too. (I wouldn't remove the option to choose starting point+lenght).
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree and something we were trying to work on.
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.
I like this interface over the current one. The only issue I had with it is not having millisecond steps to create a decent loop. I also wasn't getting a thumbnail preview in the black box when seeking the video.
I think the advantage of choosing your endpoint is it allows finer grained control over what gets rendered in the GIF
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.
Plan was to get a different domain (suggestions?) and fwd it but still have the GYT functionality
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
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.
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
YES. IDEA #1 IS GREAT. Will be done! Also thank you for the bookmarklet. I'll PM you about the tech ^_^
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
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
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.
hahahahahahhaha. Yeee. I also love emoticons. We actually started out with a gif messenger (glyphic) because we loved texting with emoticons/gifs so much.
Since gifyoutube doesn't support https, this is an updated bookmarklet for thost who use youtube with https and need to change the protocol along with the host:
Yes, we all got that. But the reason why doing so would break gifyoutube would have been because gifyoutube didn't support HTTPS. Which is why the former commenter noted that gifyoutube does support SSL.
The exif comment of the resulting gif file is 'Lavc54.59.100'. So it's most likely ffmpeg/libav or a tool that utilizes their libraries, such as mplayer. It's fairly simple to produce a GIF from a video file using the ffmpeg cli.
Really great idea. A little feedback: the huge animating background is really distracting. It also doesn't play well with click-to-play flash blockers.
Regarding the latter: please provide alternate content (at least a notice) for your <object> tags, for people who don't have flash. If nothing else, you might provide a <video> version, if the content is not interactive. (Then again, if the content is not interactive, you might as well only have a <video> version.)
Worked good...I'm amazed it hasn't been crashed from being top on Hacker News Oo It mentioned queueing work and things like that, must be impressively well written to not just try every request at once and hose itself.
Ahaha thank you thank you. We ended up being the most upvoted thing on imgur one day ( http://imgur.com/gallery/vSDlg ), and we learned a lot of lessons after crashing a lot ahahaha:')
As an amateur sportswriter, I expect to be using this a LOT during the upcoming season -- provided there aren't any legal issues with the youtube name, copyright on clips, etc.
My blog is officially part of one of the content owners' networks. Plus there's the whole "fair use doctrine" that generally allows small snippets for commentary purposes.
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.
I'm also interested in how you're doing this. I also wanted to do youtube previews for a website and this seems strictly superior to the thumbnails they offer :)
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.
Excellent job! I love url hacking =). I still frequently type "repeat" after "youtube" in order to loop songs, but I probably wouldn't bother to cut and paste the url into a third party site.
Along those same lines, if you feel like doing some related hackery, I'd love to see a youtube video (and audio) reverser. Sometimes people stick reversed audio in their videos, and I'd like to hear it played back the right way around; right now, I do that via youtube-dl and audacity, which is a pain. As far as I can tell, there aren't any reverse video players around at all.
This looks great!! Thanks. Coub.com has great ui for user selecting precise in/out points. http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=WThZsGOVkbk&p=n#/458;464 lets you select LOOP in/out right in URL. But neither make GIF, so easy to cut and paste.
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.
Great job with this. Very useful. The only issue I see is that Google may sue over domain/trademark issues. Facebook has done this to many sites for using "fb" in their domains. While you're getting lots of attention, you may want to offer a browser plugin/extension/bookmarklet that interfaces with the site (have the bookmarklet use a domain less likely to be contested) so that you can keep momentum going if they happen to take your domain.
I wouldn't bet on it. http://pwnyoutube.com has been around for quite a while now. Although if I remember it right, youtube blocked some IPs associated with tools that let you download/convert videos, as these services violate the terms of use.
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.
The cases I'm familiar with were 1) clones of Facebook and 2) using "book" in their name. They were more obviously trying to be Facebook. Being a thing for Facebook (YouTube, etc.) is usually handled differently.
Looks like it's getting crushed with traffic, so I can't even check it out.
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.
185 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadMaybe 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
[1]: https://github.com/mediacrush/mediacrush
Do you think it's worthwhile? If not, why?
[1] https://blog.mediacru.sh/2014/07/12/State-of-MediaCrush-2014...
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.
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.
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;
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'm actually surprised now too :O
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...
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
http://lmgtfy.com/
https://dir.yahoo.com/
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 :[
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