Hi everyone, I've made number of upgrades to the service based on the feedback I've received. Improved overall GIF quality by using high-def input stream, added powerful cropping functionality as well improvements to the overall usability.
Looking for more suggestions on improving this service.
I use both YouTube-DL and FFMPEG to accomplish this task. I will say this, creating high quality GIF is by far the easiest part of the whole thing. Bypassing too many request as well as throttling which youtube is very good at was the trickiest part and still is. Making something work for a single user is one thing, scaling so everyone else can use it is a whole different beast. The name of the game is proxy and everything revolves around that.
This is a GIF maker, so it creates GIFs from videos and nothing more. Due to the fact that GIFs are over 30 years old, it should not be compared to today's technology, specially video encoding which is very different from a soundless looping image. Having said that, I'm all for something new that will replace a GIF with more modern approach and millions of colors.
> it should not be compared to today's technology, specially video encoding which is very different from a soundless looping image
Considering most sites that let users upload gifs convert them into looping soundless videos, I'd say they're "very different" insofar as they're very inferior.
Also to add to your point, file storage is becoming ambiguous with cloud option and also very cheap and abundant on most devices these days, internet speed is fast enough that large file size is not that big of an issue, so the benefits outweigh its limitations. GIFs are still best way to quickly share something that is expressive and purely visual. There are other technologies to support looping visual, but nothing that has been universally supported as GIF has. I'll be happy to offer other formats once they become available in the future.
I do use both YouTube-DL and FFMPEG, and producing high-res GIF is actually very easy. It took me two weeks (part time) to launch the first raw version that worked well on my machine :) but took over a year to be able to scale it so everyone else can use it as well.
Also I like to add, I've build number of applications using an API only to regret the time I spent on it later. When you rely on external API, its really not your product and you don't own it, API owns you and every move you make. Instead, I would rather rely on a strong community for support such as YouTube-DL, even though there are issues and its not perfect, still much better than API route, just my two cents.
GIFs should not be compared to videos, for one GIF is 30 year old technology with obvious limitations, however, there is still demand due to its portability. It also creates better effect if its very short clip, which most GIFs are. I appreciate you checking it out.
What platform doesn't have the ability to play an mp4 file? GNU Icecat on a FSF approved distro maybe, but beyond that? The portability advantage of gifs are greatly overstated.
The way I see it, gifs are strictly obsolete. They're big, load slow, and have limited color support (what's the point of a high-resolution gif if you're going to trash all the color data anyway?)
You made all the right points about GIF, it is an outdated technology for sure, but nothing has truly replaced it yet, there is apng as well as other technologies, but that's not universally supported as GIFs are.
I still haven’t figured out the magic codec I can plug into ffmpeg so the self hosted videos on my Wordpress work on all web browsers (i thought h264 would do it but mobile still doesn’t like it) gifs are designed to be portable and work every time
In contrast, if your gif is over 1MB, my mobile browser will not display it. This is done to prevent excess data use. (It's a uBo ruleset)
I'm unsure what browsers will still not support h264 however. Most commonly you'd find webmasters using both webm and mp4s in their video sources to allow the benefits of the webm filesize, and the mp4 to support ios devices
There are number of things that court would consider if its fair use, GIFs generally fall into that category, there haven't been a case brought to courts yet, but doesn't mean there won't be.
