GIFs!

[Norfen]

I find gifs an excellent alternative to embedded videos, but on both Android and iOS they fail terribly. How do gifs work on the Pandora?

 

[emcee]

How big of GIFs are we talking? It seems like any big enough to considered an "excellent alternative" to embedded video (if you're not into talkies), would be huge, and I could see memory issues. But for basic "guy tries to cover a giant spider on the ceiling with a bowl and it falls on his face instead" types GIFs, you should be fine. They play okay on my n900 anyway (it has the same basic innards).


I'd say "I don't see any reason why not", but I'd say the same thing about Android and iOS.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

You know that a GIF image can only handle 256 colors at once?

 

[sebt3]

You know that a GIF image can only handle 256 colors at once?

and have no sound

 

[lulzfish]

How do gifs work on the Pandora?

Well....

You know that a GIF image can only handle 256 colors at once?

and have no sound

The same way they work on any system: Like a crap lossy, dithered picture format that happens to 'support' animation.


Please consider APNG, MJPEG, or Ogg+Theora, the last of which is an actual media container containing an actual video codec and has the option for Vorbis, FLAC, or maybe WAV sound, too. Maybe MP3, never tried it.

 

[Yannick]

I thought we were a retro computing community


if gif's aren't retro computing, then what is?

 

[TrashyMG]

I thought we were a retro computing community


if gif's aren't retro computing, then what is?

Animated gifs reminds me of all those early webpages of yesteryear.. lets throw as many Animated Gifs, blinking text, an ugly background image that doesn't repeat well and then lets add an annoying midi song while we are at it. Enough crap to choke my 9600 baud modem..


But at least there were absolutely no advertisements..

 

[Asiyura]

Animated gifs reminds me of all those early webpages of yesteryear.. lets throw as many Animated Gifs, blinking text, an ugly background image that doesn't repeat well and then lets add an annoying midi song while we are at it. Enough crap to choke my 9600 baud modem..


But at least there were absolutely no advertisements..

Ouch… just remembered all those annoying midi files that where looping continuously without any way of disabling them…


As you said, at least there where no ads.


At the time I was checking my mails only once a day. But even if I only had few mails, to download them, then send the answers took 15 minutes

But even then I could tell that animated GIFs were pure evil. Don't use those, please.

 

[Prometheus]

Animated gifs reminds me of all those early webpages of yesteryear.. lets throw as many Animated Gifs, blinking text, an ugly background image that doesn't repeat well and then lets add an annoying midi song while we are at it. Enough crap to choke my 9600 baud modem..


But at least there were absolutely no advertisements..

Don't forget irritating, processor-intensive trails that followed your mouse pointer and caused tremendous lag (themselves often animated as well!), and the giving out of "Best Site" awards for such things. :lol:

 

[Norfen]

Not trying to cause a media format backlash... I was just thinking of SenorGif... Can't watch it on anything mobile right now, and I quite love the site.

 

[Prometheus]

Haha, we're just being old, I guess. Or I am. :lol:


I've honestly never heard of this place you mention. What is it?

 

[MarkoeZ]

trying to watch that site on chrome or firefox on windows pc, with a mobile connection, takes ages to load, and consumes major bandwidth. It's really just big gifs, that's why it won't load properly.


That said, the site itself is pretty funny, i lolled at this one:

Spoiler

 

[Tom`]

Did someone say "animated gifs?"

 

[Poem58]

For their time, Animated Gifs were great. You could have a small video animation that was guaranteed to play whereas if you did try to use an actual video your audience was required to have even more bandwidth which at dial up was not happening, more patience to let it load, and the proper player. Gif's just worked. While bandwidth has increased and compression schemes have gotten much better, Gifs still are nice for things such as avatars and what not. So when used properly they can be useful without being too annoying.


EDIT: OH, the animated cursors and such! Horrible horrible ways the internet was introduced. Maybe dial up WOULD have been fast enough without all that crap.


I still use ones I made as avatars, actually if audio were included it would only sound horrible as the song would have been chopped up. People were amazed when I made this as not many knew how to do something like convert a video into a gif. At least I had the decency to keep it small, many make them much too big in size.

 

[Prometheus]

^ I remember that GIF Construction Set Pro (which I see is still around) used to have - and probably still has, I would guess - a feature where it could convert video files into animated GIFs. Of course, this makes me feel a bit old - I haven't used Microsoft Windows in an age, let alone GIF Construction Set Pro. :lol:

 

[WizardStan]

I use the GIMP for all my animated gif construction needs these days.

 

[Yoyobuae]

I find imagemagick really good for making GIFs. Specially if reducing the final size is a priority:


http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/video/#gif

 

[Poem58]

I used the gif animator from Ulead's Photoimpact. Imported the video clip I edited down in Virtualdub then optimized and voila!