When will they add support for long GIFs with sound? /s
There's a weird trend of taking full HD YouTube videos, converting them to soundless, bad quality GIFs and then upload them to twitter or imgur, where they're then encoded back to video. Quite often this goes without source to the original. I assume that people doing this just want to show the important content on the respective platform rather than sending a link (although twitter and reddit embed YouTube videos). Or is there another reason?
YouTube regularly transcodes all uploaded content into several different varieties of MP4 container. If you're on iOS, then all videos you watch on YouTube are MP4s.
I don't mean lightweight in a technical sense, I mean lightweight in terms of user experience. To view a gif (or gif converted to mp4, webm, whatever) I know it's silent (don't have to worry about muting my phone), I don't have to load the youtube app or the bloated youtube site. All I do at the most is tap to play.
I would love to see a service that caption sounds in gifs. Not just talk, everything, you gif a video of a car starting and the caption goes 'wrrrrrrooooo'
And you need to click a blue play button to play it - not in gif spirit at all! Also it can only be saved as a video, which is likely terribly compressed from the original gif.
By the way, Tumblr had this feature for ages: even the icon is completely identical. [1]
I dont need to press a button. 'GIFs' play automatically for me in Twitter when they are scrolled into view, and paused when scrolled outside of the main view area - which I think is a good experience.
