This is a very big moment for WebM. I feel 4chan has become the 'porn' industry of the internet. With VHS vs Betamax the largely deciding factor was which standard porn supported (this was again to a lesser extent with bluray).<p>The general lack of adoption of animated png's is often pointed squarely on 4chan. Since it generated most of the web's viral funny content. And since most of it was in .gif, who needs to support .apng?<p>Hopefully we will see the opposite with WebM. More general funny content, more drive for it to be adopted on sites like reddit (which already to some extent uses gifcat on some subs), and imgur. Which will snowball its general adoption.
WebM is clearly a far inferior experience compared to gif on firefox:<p>- at the start there is a stupid "fade in" effect.<p>- the loading animation does sometimes not disappear even though the video has fully loaded.<p>- the loading animation is generally annoying. Gifs just stop when bufffering and continue as soon as there is new data.<p>- a useless control bar shows at the bottom on hovering.<p>- Unlike gifs the video does not stop when you scroll beyond it which causes a huge amount of processor load.
Has anyone had experience optimizing for webm? I really want to support this codec, but it's insanely slow in my experience. I'm finding that it's generally around 4x slower than mp4, but I've also had cases where it's taken up to a minute to encode a file where h264 take under 10 seconds.<p>My use case is to have the best performance/quality ratio for a 30 second video under 3mb.<p>These are my ffmpeg flags:<p>h264: "-vcodec libx264 -crf 28"<p>webm: "-c:v libvpx -qmin 0 -qmax 50 -crf 5 -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis -aq 4"<p>The video I tested with these setting last night took 5 seconds on h264 and 35 seconds for webm, both outputting to a 2.6mb file.<p>System Specs:
- Intel Core i7 4770 Quad-Core 3.4GHz
- 16gb 1866mhz memory
- ssd drive
- 64bit ubuntu 12.04 lts<p>What further frustrates this is that I can use OpenCL to improve encoding times even more, but only with h264 in ffmpeg (as far as I know).
Any reason to not support h264, which seems to have similar levels of browser support? (trades Firefox on Linux/OS X/WinVista for support on IE/Safari/iOS/Android)
Awesome! I'm still waiting for other sites like imgur to get with the program :D<p>Edit: Thread 2 (Yeah, 4chan, possibly probably nsfw, etc): <a href="http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/41215438#p41215438" rel="nofollow">http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/41215438#p41215438</a>
OP's link is 404ing and moot's won't connect at all for me. There's no way HN took down 4chan. Anyone have additional info/a mirror?
WebM is a fantastic step forward. I prefer gfycat links over imgur gifs when browsing reddit (gfycat is a service that converts gifs to WebM). It does have minor teething problems (controls, loading animations, etc) but its advantages outweigh its negatives.<p>WebP however for some reason hasn't gained as much traction as WebM. Firefox refuses to merge support, despite the fact it leverages the same library is WebM. I'd like to see WebP gain support more than WebM, Google's mod_speed converts images to WebM if using the Chrome browser to save on bandwidth.
One problem I have is that there is no way to set format priority which would override page order. And because of some Apple's stupid bugs in Safari most pages list mp4 first. Current Firefox already supports mp4/H.264 through gstreamer, so it always picks that first even if WebM is available.<p>I'd prefer to set some option of "free codecs first".