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Show HN: Put “GIF” in front of any YouTube URL and hit enter

577 points| RoryGlyphic | 11 years ago |gifyoutube.com

181 comments

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[+] JoshTriplett|11 years ago|reply
Very nice. If this had a simple way to add timed annotations ("#ann=top,10s,18.3s,SomeText" or similar), that'd be absurdly useful.

What technology did you build this with? What do you use to decode videos and write out gifs?

Here's a useful bookmarklet to apply this to a video: javascript:location.host="gifyoutube.com"

EDIT: are you getting hammered by traffic right now? Because I tried this on a 15 second video, and it's been processing for ten minutes.

[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
YES. IDEA #1 IS GREAT. Will be done! Also thank you for the bookmarklet. I'll PM you about the tech ^_^

As per the edit - yeah a ton of traffic BUT generally right now 98% of GIFs are making. We have a known problem with vevo and other music videos though :(. If you post the YT link I can look into it and see if it's a traffic thing or just one that wouldn't work normally

[+] gmanley|11 years ago|reply
The exif comment of the resulting gif file is 'Lavc54.59.100'. So it's most likely ffmpeg/libav or a tool that utilizes their libraries, such as mplayer. It's fairly simple to produce a GIF from a video file using the ffmpeg cli.
[+] downandout|11 years ago|reply
Great job with this. Very useful. The only issue I see is that Google may sue over domain/trademark issues. Facebook has done this to many sites for using "fb" in their domains. While you're getting lots of attention, you may want to offer a browser plugin/extension/bookmarklet that interfaces with the site (have the bookmarklet use a domain less likely to be contested) so that you can keep momentum going if they happen to take your domain.
[+] brute|11 years ago|reply
I wouldn't bet on it. http://pwnyoutube.com has been around for quite a while now. Although if I remember it right, youtube blocked some IPs associated with tools that let you download/convert videos, as these services violate the terms of use.

Btw: I find it nice that this tool supports https. pwnyoutube.com requires you to remove it manually, which makes it so much more inconvenient to use.

[+] dools|11 years ago|reply
I've never had any trouble with cueyoutube.com (although admittedly it's never been terrifically popular but people do complain if it breaks :)
[+] tedunangst|11 years ago|reply
The cases I'm familiar with were 1) clones of Facebook and 2) using "book" in their name. They were more obviously trying to be Facebook. Being a thing for Facebook (YouTube, etc.) is usually handled differently.
[+] sunsu|11 years ago|reply
To back up your statement: Back in the day my buddy created "greedtube.com" and received a Cease and Desist within 48 hours.
[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
Definitely; great advice. Thank you downandout :D
[+] iopq|11 years ago|reply
How about let me google it for you?
[+] NamTaf|11 years ago|reply
The presentation of the page ("copy pasta z", the fullscreen gif background, the popup in the middle, the banner in the top left) all strike me as being dodgy/malicious and from a site that I'd immediately want to close and never visit again.

I'm not sure why you see the need to be so 'internet' with it all when you could do a fully functional equivalent that would be easier on your servers too. Just make it clean and usable and it'll be far better.

[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
Hey Nam! Really appreciate the comment.

We were just being silly and hacking away at it adding random things that made us lol hahaha.

You're right though. Moving forward minimalist is what we hope to accomplish.

Thanks for the feedback ^_^

[+] hpeinar|11 years ago|reply
I'd second that. Make it clean, easy for the eye and it's far more usable.

But great tool nonetheless. Props to you!

[+] lotharbot|11 years ago|reply
As an amateur sportswriter, I expect to be using this a LOT during the upcoming season -- provided there aren't any legal issues with the youtube name, copyright on clips, etc.

Took like 15 seconds to make http://share.gifyoutube.com/lcD.gif (a game-winning shot from a couple seasons back).

[+] chatmasta|11 years ago|reply
Shouldn't you be more worried about legal issues of turning a copyrighted broadcast, possibly not even uploaded by the content owner, into a gif?
[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
Thank you lotharbot ^_^. We appreciate it! Great GIF btw
[+] robszumski|11 years ago|reply
Really great idea. A little feedback: the huge animating background is really distracting. It also doesn't play well with click-to-play flash blockers.
[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
I'm sorry :(. That was totally me. I made sadsquidward.com and riddlydiddly.com a little while ago and just was obsessed with GIFs ahaha.

Will definitely change in the next update. I was thinking maybe a very small change just for the lols- like a cloud just drifting by

[+] fragmede|11 years ago|reply
Yes, someone else gets it - keep it simple!

I made quietyoutube.com (put 'quiet' in front of any youtube video) and get a page of just the video, nothing else. I made it a couple years arg. Shame I can't get the SSL cert, though the bookmarklet I made works well enough.

[+] mesozoic|11 years ago|reply
I love it. You should probably get another domain though for the imminent C&D
[+] anonova|11 years ago|reply
Maybe but maybe not. nsfwyoutube.com uses a similar idea of appending "nswf" to the domain and has been around for years.
[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
Definitely :3. Any suggestions?
[+] valarauca1|11 years ago|reply
This is really cool. And I hate to be that guy, especially so early. But wouldn't it be easier on both networking and cpu to convert it to a webm?
[+] georgemcbay|11 years ago|reply
This is nice work, but I'll go ahead and be the token negative nancy HN poster and say:

Fuck GIF; just because the patent expired doesn't mean we should use this piece of shit (by modern standards) format for things it was never really intended for and for which there are far better solutions, like just linking to the actual video.

[+] Shorel|11 years ago|reply
Now I only need to send that link to http://www.gfycat.com/ for it to load fast.

Full circle!

[+] nikolak|11 years ago|reply
Or you could just use gfycat to create both gif and webm versions (up to 15 sec long) directly from youtube, vimeo etc.
[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
We actually made a webm version! Will update when we release ^_^
[+] agumonkey|11 years ago|reply
It's always good to have bidirectional functions I guess.
[+] lelandbatey|11 years ago|reply
Wow, talk about a really small world! OP (RoryGlyphic) are you the guy who sent me a text message asking if I'd want to get involved with making a YouTube-to-Gif site (specifically, this conversation[0]). If so, I wanted to say good job on finishing your project, it works great and is easy to use (an much less hackish than my original GifMachine[1]).

Also, I'm super excited that something I made a long time ago prompted someone else to make something waaaaay more awesome.

Question, you asked about using Gunicorn in our conversation, is this written in Python or is it written using something else? I'm really curious about the technologies you use to make this work!

Also of note, why do you ask for a title? I don't see it on the resulting gif page: https://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/lP1

[0] - http://i.imgur.com/KVl7beK.png

[1] - http://gifmachine.xwl.me/

[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH OMGGGGG!!!!!! THIS IS HILARIOUS HAHAHAHAHAH.

Damn this is actually great. We messaged a few people asking to help cut times (which was my biggest pet peeve). No one ever came through :').

For the title, it's just something we're testing out. I love scrolling through the DB etc, and a title makes me laugh ahaha. Maybe we can use it in a future thing?

I'm gonna text you ^_^

[+] xccx|11 years ago|reply
This looks great!! Thanks. Coub.com has great ui for user selecting precise in/out points. http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=WThZsGOVkbk&p=n#/458;464 lets you select LOOP in/out right in URL. But neither make GIF, so easy to cut and paste.

Feature request: please enable preview of youtube loop right in your url like gifyoutube.com/y0ut0oo0biD&loop=123.4;5.67 where first number is 'start time' then second number is 'length'. And allow millisecond specification.

File size could be smaller? EG 0.14 second frames instead of 0.08, longer duration frames aren't too noticable and may cut bulky GIF sizes almost in half.

[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
I love the feature request! We'll definitely try to implement this (maybe after captions?)

File size is something we want to do as well. Working with smallest webm available, but still want the gif size to be smaller

[+] gus_massa|11 years ago|reply
I like that you can choose the starting time directly in the video. But I'd like to choose the finishing time in the video too. (I wouldn't remove the option to choose starting point+lenght).
[+] leni536|11 years ago|reply
Maybe it would be a good idea (or not) to use javascript to ease on server side CPU usage:

https://bgrins.github.io/videoconverter.js

It's quite bruteforce and it is a really large javascript file, however you could leave out all the unneeded codecs for reducing the size. Also you could first preprocess the video on server side (clipping the time interval, maybe resizing) and only leave the gif encoding to the client.

[+] bkd|11 years ago|reply
My videos get stretched from 4x3 to 16:9 (they're stuff I've transferred from film). Example: TcoLoIcxCRg
[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
Hmmmmm...it's something you'd rather maintain as 4x3 right?
[+] personlurking|11 years ago|reply
Really cool!

One issue I see is when someone uses the same word as title, no one else can use it (as opposed to a number-based titling system where no one would care if /90289432 was in use). Also someone else can peruse other people's gifs by just checking random titles (perhaps a non-issue, though).

[+] archon810|11 years ago|reply
Looks like it's getting crushed with traffic, so I can't even check it out.

But one key feature for me would be the ability to add text to various frames/time ranges. That would make creating GIFs that actually say stuff you can read much easier.

[+] RoryGlyphic|11 years ago|reply
HMMM. Still working for me :O. Maybe a video that won't be GIF'd? (vevo/music). Sometimes it does stop people though :O.

The text thing was going to be our next update mwahahahhaha. Great idea thank you