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Videos instead of GIFs for animated thumbnails #404

Open Fironet opened 8 years ago

Fironet commented 8 years ago

So, itch.io is known for it's animated thumbnails. They're probably the bees knees but as they're GIFs they bog the page down in loading times and are just generally oversized and slow to load themselves.

Take this 11MB (!) GIF from Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, featured currently on the home page. It could easily be an MP4 and save a ton of space and speed up the loading times.

Using ffmpeg to convert it for example results in a 1.9MB video.

ffmpeg -i input.gif -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4
TangentFoxy commented 8 years ago

A full page of mp4's playing is a lot more CPU intensive.

I think a GIF size limit might be better, or, if using video, one should have a thumbnail with a play button on it first.

I know there's a way to disable GIF loaded for yourself to reduce bandwidth usage..but I can't for the life of me remember how to.

fasterthanlime commented 8 years ago

but I can't for the life of me remember how to.

https://itch.io/user/settings

TangentFoxy commented 8 years ago

Ah, thank you.

Fironet commented 8 years ago

A full page of mp4's playing is a lot more CPU intensive.

I'll take your word for it. Has this been tested? From the user feedback I've seen on forums a page of GIFs are often the thing that brings a browser to a halt.

I know there's a way to disable GIF loaded for yourself to reduce bandwidth usage.. https://itch.io/user/settings

Thanks for the tip. Though his only works when you're signed in, which personally is rarely, unless I want to buy something.

fasterthanlime commented 8 years ago

A full page of mp4's playing is a lot more CPU intensive.

I'm not convinced by this, by the way. We've had plans to start transcoding GIFs to video formats for a while, but haven't had time to come around to it yet!

TangentFoxy commented 8 years ago

I've not tested it myself, but I've heard it's worse than using GIFs. I doubt I'll have the time to try it but if I do, I'd love to actually put numbers to it. On Apr 25, 2016 5:03 AM, "Amos Wenger" notifications@github.com wrote:

A full page of mp4's playing is a lot more CPU intensive.

I'm not convinced by this, by the way. We've had plans to start transcoding GIFs to video formats for a while, but haven't had time to come around to it yet!

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/404#issuecomment-214283423

xan2622 commented 8 years ago

Why not .webm videos instead of .gif files ?

Fironet commented 8 years ago

Why not .webm videos instead of .gif files ?

Unless something has changed recently WebM/VPx has been shown to be quite taxing on CPUs compared to MP4/h.264. Excellent quality for the size though. I'm sure some tests would be done if it were considered.

fasterthanlime commented 8 years ago

WebM/VPx has been shown to be quite taxing on CPUs

At least encoding-wise, a few years ago libvpx was ~20x slower than libx265 on some workloads