Animated images are loading and playing so much faster now!

I also saw in the VIP zip download of some SlapstickStuff's posts with preview pics that had animated gifs now have the mp4s and the zip is like half the size.

Is there a new feature which converted animated gif into mp4?

Do all new gifs get converted?

I uploaded one recently that is still a gif.

Is it possible to upload a short silent mp4 instead of a gif?

Or does this open the door to too many issues?

Overall, what ever was done just seems seamless and smooth. I used to get impatient with gifs and now they appear on the wall like magic.

I had separate questions or ideas relating to content:

Can jfif upload can be supported or converted to jpeg?

People in the AI WAM group noticed that browsers are using this format to save images which adds an extra step to upload generated images.

Can png above a size threshold be converted to jpeg?

There are some very large images being uploaded to the AI WAM group as png. They take long to download to view them, and I am wondering if it would be better to automatically convert these to jpeg.

You caught me UMD does now convert gif's into mp4 format, and past gif's have been transcoded as well. Motion gif's are huge, getting up to 5Mb or more, which really held back places like the Wall. I made the change on the low because at this time I really have no intent on taking it further, such as allowing mp4's to be uploaded directly. The move for now was only to replace those pesky motion gif's. Still gif's shouldn't be touched, though.

> Overall, what ever was done just seems seamless and smooth.

Thanks! I wish I could say it was actually like that. I'm finding that some browsers don't like mp4's embedded directly like this, so I'm still working through some things like that. Just happy about the 20x reduction in file sizes, so it's worth it

> Can jfif upload can be supported or converted to jpeg?

We're not supporting jfif right now as I'm not really seeing any of them get uploaded; Maybe later if it becomes more ubiquitous. Did just add support for webp tho!

> There are some very large images being uploaded to the AI WAM group as png.... I am wondering if it would be better to automatically convert these to jpeg.

That is definitely on my To Do list. Not sure when I can get to it tho

I've noticed that the converted moving GIF images don't play/animate on an iPhone (13) on any browser but they do play on both Firefox and Safari on desktop (MacBook Pro).

I didn't mention it because I always presume such glitches are short term bridges to site tweaks and improvements - as they often are. Or server problems somewhere along the line.

Hi Messmaster, one small issue with this.

https://umd.net/forums/forum/messy

At the bottom right where it displays the PotD, it does not display correctly if it is a gif which it happens to be today.

I did notice that, and I plan to have a fix for that by the end of the week. Thank you!

Hi
just noticed this and the gif conversion... i had 2 gif's on my pics and these now dont seem to work
Was there an issue with these ones?
Thanks

It's kinda weird how I convert an .mp4 to a .gif, only to have it converted back to an .mp4

Is the upload limit for gifs still 10MB? Knowing it's going to be displayed as an mp4 it'd be nice to be able to upload a gif with the maximum quality possible knowing that loading times won't be such an issue.

They work from my end. You may have to click them to make them start playing on your browser or device. I've not yet been able to get autoplay to work on all browsers


It's 15MB right now. The gifs are converted after the fact and meanwhile the fullsize gifs would be served. So the size limitation needs to be enforced from the get go. To allow a huge gif and rely on it being less than 15MB after re-encoding, the gif would have to be converted and then checked in realtime right when you upload them. That delay that would take forever and use way more resources that we really don't have. Some day I may allow direct mp4 uploads into the picture areas