Yet another video test using a GIF from a Pixelfed server at pxlmo.com
Let me know if this works any better or worse
and also, Happy Vulcan Day .... lol
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If I click it, the image comes up. Also after I came into the post, the little preview image showed, but it never would load the bigger version... until it did. Prior to coming into the post, neither the auto-preview nor clicking for the larger preview worked. Perhaps it is choking on too much data?
From Discuss.Online, visited using a web browser (Chrome on a Mac OSX).
Edit: everything worked instantly from Android Firefox though.
I do hope improvements will be made to Lemmy receiving software before this becomes more popular though - I share a lot of images, and I almost always go far out of my way to avoid them animating b/c that can be super annoying to many people, myself included. It would be different if it would stop after like 3 cycles but to just keep going and never stop - aaaack! Not only should there be a way to opt-out of being shown animations, but the default behavior should be opt-in, imho. e.g., clicking and seeing an animation = perfection, but the preview images may be better off constrained to be static?
Edit 2: from its original location on lemmy.ca, from the same machine as the first one (desktop) but switched to Firefox, everything also worked fine, fwiw.
I think it's a limitation to it being a GIF .... in the ancient days of the early internet the GIF was a novelty format that was designed to be tiny animated little box for some reason. There was probably a design reason for it a long time ago but it's long forgotten now. The way it operates and is displayed now is just a legacy way of using the format .... it's a GIF, an animated picture that is meant to just go on and on and on forever repeating itself. It probably made sense a long time ago but not any more.
The reason I keep drifting back to using GIF is that it's one of the easiest formats to display because the GIF system is universally compatible to most software because its been around for so long.
When I post WEBM ... which are great btw ... the viewer has the choice of what to do with it and how to view it and there is no question, it's a video, just a video. Unfortunately, WEBM is not universally supported even though it should be ... and how its displayed, how its played, how it appears and how its used all come into play depending on your platform, app, device or OS or even geolocation.
File size is another argument about all this ... GIF is inefficient .. WEBM creates great videos for small files sizes ... image hosting servers keep complaining that video clips are too big to host, yet I see some JPGs that are bigger than some WEBM and GIF are sometimes massive ... they are backwards compatible to inefficient GIF which they don't like, questionably compatible to WEBM but are no bigger than some static images out there.
It's a pain right now but yes ... I hope they figure it out eventually because I enjoy video memes ... its just such a pain to post them properly right now.
Just an example, a 250mb gif could be 50mb or less as a webm. GIF is a horrible format, and we've known that forever.
Somehow I expected you would say all this - it really is a pain, and atm we all seem helpless, at the mercy of the Chosen Browsers, to take care of us as they deem fit.
They allow what formats we use or not, like webm vs. not. Even something like allowing someone to stop a moving gif by tapping on it seems not a priority for them.
I wonder if there's a plugin or extension or some such that would do it, but even if so, the main part of the discussion is how it affects people new to the Fediverse, maybe only just checking it out while still remaining rooted in Reddit.
So even if, e.g. a super awesome app for the Fediverse exists that would do this and more, would that fact alone mean that it is okay to neglect the browser experience? These are difficult questions and I don't think there are any singular answers that will work for everyone.
In the meantime then, we are back to: we can make use of 1980's technology, or we could not, and for whatever reason there is very little left to us in between those extremes:-(.
And similarly, we can post memes in whatever format we like, but the more annoying people are about it the more others will end up having to block them. It would be great to have restrictions like gifs that aren't as jarring like they end where they begin again, but ultimately it ends up as: you either allow all animated gifs or else you allow none, and merely hope that people use mostly good judgement.
Or if everyone just gives up the ghost of GIF and let it die .... it is a highly inefficient format and the only reason we stick with it is that it is so universally ingrained in everything.
GIF is the digital equivalent of a fax machine .... many business offices still have a fax machine in their system and there is always someone out there who still uses a fax to transmit a paper message from one person to another for some 'official reason'. I know some people who treat faxed documents as some sort of holy relic that deserves reverence or respect just because it is a 'fax' - it can't be altered, it can't be forged, it is something we've done for years. It's a holdover from a bygone era and there are still people who won't let go of it .... GIF is treated the same way. Every piece of software can accommodate GIF just because they always did. Everyone knows it is a dinosaur that is not very good for anything but we use it just because we all can.
I'm still learning about new codecs and video containers and how they all work ... I thought WEBM was a good option but now realize that it may be a more proprietary container that is aligned with Google while MP4 is a similar file container that is more universal and more open standard to a whole industry internationally rather than to just one company.
It's going to be a bit of a slog for a while until someone figures it out ... but to me, it just feels like the early emerging internet from the 2000s when people were trying to figure stuff out. It's exciting and liberating because it makes me wonder where everything is going to go from this moment on.
But gifs don't need to be murdered to move forward - they are simple, and "good enough" for tiny non-animated things, it's just that as they get more complex, better formats scale better to higher frame numbers and such.
So e.g. the Fediverse software could still allow a movie animation as the post content, and then (like YouTube?) either manufacture a still image as the preview shown to people prior to consent via clicking to see the animation effect, or possibly allow the user to submit their own still image to be a chosen representative. That way, movies can still have their place, without having to blaze past the consent of the recipient.
Now that I think about it... this is how Reddit does it too iirc? For user submissions anyway, though more recently the ads will auto-play even without explicitly clicking on them as you scroll downwards.:-( Bc fuck spez, that's why.:-(
So there are definitely multiple ways to handle it, besides just leaving it how it currently is. In the meantime, I think I'll not submit animations the vast majority of the time, bc how they are handled by Lemmy is just too annoying to have the infinite repetitions.