"With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a .gifv extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year."<p>This is bizarre. GIFV isn't a new file format. It is just an alias for an existing format. The only reason the letters "GIF" are in this new file extension is to signal that the file was converted from a GIF, but who cares, apart from the so-called cultural connotations?<p>I mean, does anybody care to have a BMPJ (a JPEG file that was converted from a BMP) or a WAV3 (an MP3 that was converted from a WAV)? Or a .GIFMP4GIFMP4GIFMP4 file, which was converted back and forth a few times?
Am I misunderstanding something here? I don't see anything other than an .mp4 video served via a <video> tag from a URL that ends in .gifv. I was interested in seeing how it worked to look into supporting it for a mime type detection library I've written.<p>The blog post mentions submitting a specification to the relevant standards organization. Are they planning on creating a new mp4 ftyp and registering a mimetype with IANA?
The "convert-GIF-to-MP4" technique is the same technique that Twitter [1] and Imgur-competitior Giphy [2] uses.<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-telling-you-about-gifs" rel="nofollow">http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-tell...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g0791/hey_reddit_were_giphy_lets_talk_about_gifs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g0791/hey_reddit_were...</a>
an animated gif is not necessarily a video clip, but it seems that i'm in the minority these days.<p>here's a gif by nicolas sassoon, which format would you prefer?<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gif" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gif</a> (1.3 MB)<p>or<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gifv" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/fv0qgkc.gifv</a> (3.9 MB)
I think this actually in response to Gyfcat, who have been doing this exact same thing for a while, and eating up quite a lot of imgur's redditshare: <a href="https://gfycat.com/" rel="nofollow">https://gfycat.com/</a>
No. Just no. These are muted videos, not GIFs.<p>GIFs have an 8-bit palette. They're lossless. They are meant to be short and sweet, because they take up a lot of bits.<p>They're also easy to manipulate, easy to encode/decode (I have a single .java file which generates animated GIFs) and <i>unequivocally</i> patent-free.<p>Let us stand up against this subversion of the pure GIF format. [success_kid.gif]
Anyone try to browse images on Imgur on iOS lately? I have. It's a huge pain because M4V videos take over the entire screen when they open. This looks great on a desktop browser where the videos play right on the page, but on iOS the experience is markedly worse than before. The videos load faster, but having to tap play, watching it loop, then tapping on the video again to bring up the header/footer, then tapping Done to stop the video... How is that better than just tapping Play?<p>Now, I understand that this is an issue with iOS and not with Imgur, but honestly, GIFV is not a great improvement, technologically or otherwise.<p>Also, note that most GIF's on Imgur end up there as screen caps of various web videos. In other words the process is now M4V -> GIF -> M4V. Instead, Imgur could just build tools for better short video creation that they could then host.
I don't know if its just me, but the GIFVs embedded on the page dont load for me, unless I click on them to open them in a page on their own, and the second one doesn't play even in this case.<p>Firefox 32.0.3 on Linux
I'm a little disappointed that they've not only created an absurd new file extension, but that they're settling on patent-encumbered H.264 video compression.
I think bhuston said it best.<p>>This is a marketing endeavor that is pretending to be a technical innovation.<p>Most of us are asking, why isn't it format X, or format Y. When they are clearly superior in quality and compression. The answer is they don't have marketing power.<p>GIFV is directed at increasing attention to imgur. By trying to make more sites adopt it as their image/video hosting platform. Since imgur already has the size/market dominance to spread the GIFV platform. Increasing its chance of adoption.<p>Rise above, support webm. Better compression, better quality, more wide spread.
The reason Imgur is doing what they're doing makes sense (downloading animated GIFs is an absurd waste of bandwidth when people just want to see really short low-quality videos in their browsers).<p>The way they're going about it and the way they're marketing the decision is arguably kinda silly. But the monocle-popping that is occurring in this thread is an order of magnitude sillier than anything Imgur is doing.<p>This is really not worthy of the volume or intensity of the hand-wringing that is occurring in this thread. This is the type of news that you either ignore completely, or skim, nod, and move on. At worst it deserves some exaggerated eye rolling or a sarcastic joke to a cow-orker during lunch.
I cannot right click and save an MP4 video in my browser.<p>I cannot drag and drop it into an email.<p>As a regular end user, I can use approved sharing features only. As a developer, yeah, I can download it myself and rehost it somewhere that hopefully supports MP4 video.<p>The historical pissing match over how to best do animated PNG files is sad. An animated image format that is treated differently from videos is a nice thing to have.<p>People have entire folders full of appropriate reaction GIFs. With how MP4 video is treated online today, such a thing is not possble.
Why a new extension?<p>Doesn't mp4 have enough extensions? .aac, .mp4, .m4a, .m4b, .mp4v, .m4p, .m4v, .mpeg4 so far.<p>And now .gifv? I don't get it.
To all of you here asking 'why not webm?' consider this -- gfycat serves both webm and h264, I'm pretty sure imgur will add that in future, so no big deal. As for support, most of you are sitting on Chrome already, so you won't have any troubles playing h264.<p>Cheers.
Beyond the webp/m debate that I'm sure will take place here adequately without my input:<p>I think one of the bigger concerns these days with "short video clips on the web" - which is what we're all trying to solve with whatever technology - is workflow. People finally understand how to make gifs even if they're super low quality, or super large, then these poorly compressed "images" are being converted into various other things. If the tools were there to create audio-less MP4 / webp/m, that would help a lot.
the link is down for me (it says page not found), here is the cached version from google <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aimgur.com%2Fblog%2F2014%2F10%2F09%2Fintroducing-gifv%2F" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aimgur...</a>
The marketing here is a little disingenuous ("Imgur is reimagining the looping GIF video"), and a good number of Imgur users (those that have also used Gfycat, the intersection of which I presume are relatively dedicated users) will know it. Not a great move.
Oh thank god. Finally.<p>I've been hoping they'd do this for a while. I hate browsing Reddit and finding a link to a little 'video' that then takes minutes to download fully and still looks terrible because it's a 15MB gif.
As someone who runs a website with something similar, I'm hoping that Imgur is big enough to push for some open standards around this. I want embedding video to become as commonplace as embedding GIFs.
Surprised ctrl+f 'mobile' returns only one result..<p>gifv is broken for mobile. I have to click play, and it runs as a video. That is not gif UX.
Part of the reason GIFs are so popular is because of the limited colorspace. The new colorspace and compression sort of turn this into an entirely new medium not a better GIF. Other than the sometimes better filesize I don't really understand the appeal of any of this. Especially since support is far from that of GIF.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet: why is imgur allowed to use copyrighted material to promote this new feature? I'm pretty certain they didn't get permission to use those clips from Tron or Star Wars. Does the fact that they were created by a user somehow give them immunity?
I clicked on this story hoping to find a clever alternative to the raster path for traversing images in GIF images, when used to compress video (highly correlated images). Something that preserves the spirit of GIF, but sucks less for what kids are using it online these days. Bummer.
I wrote a service in Go to transparently transcode gif to video that you might be interested in: <a href="https://github.com/leafo/gifserver" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/leafo/gifserver</a>
All I get is:<p><pre><code> Specified "type" attribute of "video/mp4" is not supported. Load of media resource http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.mp4 failed.</code></pre>
Right after I finish my mp4 to gif shell script!<p><a href="https://github.com/montanaflynn/vidtogif" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/montanaflynn/vidtogif</a>
Great, a format for small embedded animations similar to GIFs, except that they cannot be stopped using the "Toggle animated GIFs" Firefox extension.
I heard of a HTML5-based alternative some time ago called the "ugoira HTML5 zip player". It uses a ZIP file of PNG/JPG files and renders the animation using JavaScript onto a <canvas>. There's a detailed slide deck talking about it [1] and the source code is available too [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/" rel="nofollow">https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player</a>
Nothing new, it's been shown before by another website.<p>Plus what the f<i></i>* with renaming a .mp4 to a .gifv ? Two extensions for the same format ?