Large animated GIFs in posts

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calima
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Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by calima »

[Note from staff: This thread is split off from this one.]

Those gigantic gifs are killing my browser. Could you please optimize them better in the future? Try to keep each gif under 500kb, not several megs.
tepples
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Re: Super Sunny World - New NES Platformer

Post by tepples »

I looked at one of the GIFs in GIMP, and it looked like the GIF was already optimized to send only changed portions. It's just that "changed portions" in a game that scrolls and has CHR animation are going to be fairly large. In addition, when a video of gameplay is upscaled to look good on higher DPI monitors, the file becomes larger.

It would also be possible to use a format other than GIF. However, formats other than GIF would not automatically play. Each user would have to download and install VLC media player (or another player capable of playing WebM video), download the attached video to the Downloads folder of their own computer, unzip it somewhere, and play it there. I imagine this to be highly inconvenient for users of mainstream pocket computers that run Android or iOS.

Or is it considered harmful in general to embed an automatically playing silent video of a game in the game's topic on a forum?
calima
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Re: Super Sunny World - New NES Platformer

Post by calima »

gifsicle -O3 cuts about a quarter off them, to get more they'd have to be lower res too indeed.
lidnariq
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Re: Super Sunny World - New NES Platformer

Post by lidnariq »

Animated lossless WEBP works wonders for file size here. And the downside of WEBP - its mandatory chroma subsampling - doesn't matter when the input is scaled up nearest-neighbor by this factor of 4.
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Individualised
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Re: Super Sunny World - New NES Platformer

Post by Individualised »

I think the issue is that the GIFs are obscenely large even on an HD display. In the case of classic games GIFs should always be at the native resolution of the game recorded unless there's a specific reason not to do that. GIFs were never meant to be used for such large images.
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Goose2k
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Re: Super Sunny World - New NES Platformer

Post by Goose2k »

I'm going to avoid commenting on the subjective stuff about ideal gif resolution, file size, etc. :beer:
tepples wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:36 am Or is it considered harmful in general to embed an automatically playing silent video of a game in the game's topic on a forum?
lidnariq wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 10:07 am Animated lossless WEBP works wonders for file size here.
Is it possible to have another animated format (video, something else) display on these forums in browser?
calima wrote: Tue Mar 28, 2023 11:20 pm Those gigantic gifs are killing my browser.
@camila, do you have the same issue on this page? viewtopic.php?t=22469

Is anyone else having performance issues on this page?
Fiskbit
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by Fiskbit »

When someone shows off their work, please refrain from turning the thread into a conversation about tangential content. I've split this off so the original thread can be about the new content that our community member is trying to show off.
lidnariq
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Re: Super Sunny World - New NES Platformer

Post by lidnariq »

A whole bunch of actual video formats are supported, including but not limited to: 3gp, 3g2, m4v, mov, mp4, mpeg, mpg, ogm, ogv, rm, webm ...
but 1- none of them seem to embed instead of "just are a downloadable thing" and 2- not animated webp and animated pngs have their animation frames stripped.

I'll ask the sysop about webp.

Both animated PNGs and animated WEBPs are substantially smaller than the source gifs.
calima
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by calima »

goose2k, yes, the wiz-and-witch page similarly kills my browser.

Fiskbit, this is similar to the "your image doesn't load" reports. It's essential and not tangential, though the followup discussion could be split.
Fiskbit
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by Fiskbit »

We have a frequent problem on this forum where people make a thread to show off their work and that thread becomes about some topic that is at best only slightly related. This is not a good experience for creators, who get one thread to talk about their work. After seeing this over and over, I intend to aggressively split topics and complain when this happens. I understand that this is a discussion forum and topics will shift across a thread's lifetime, as is natural in conversations, but threads about people's work should be respectfully about that work.

For my 'image doesn't load' post, I also posted the image directly to the thread to ensure people could see it and continue the conversation. Admittedly, I was unaware some people could see the image. I'm not so upset about your post bringing the issue to goose2k's attention because one can't know that'll end up dominating the thread, but I'm frustrated that this issue keeps happening.
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Goose2k
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by Goose2k »

calima wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 11:32 pm goose2k, yes, the wiz-and-witch page similarly kills my browser.
Is there anything about your PC that you think might be related? Is it very old? Maybe running 4k monitor with scaling enabled?

I'm hoping to be able to reproduce this issue you are seeing, so I can iterate on some solutions (assuming the web video player solution doesn't come together).
lidnariq
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by lidnariq »

Linking to animated PNGs and WEBPs on third-party hosting works fine - we apparently just can't attach them here, unfortunately. At least, we haven't yet figured out how to.

I just used the standalone tool "gif2webp" for the attached.
Attachments
sun_webp.zip
(1.58 MiB) Downloaded 26 times
zzo38
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by zzo38 »

I would suggest to do two things:
  • Do not include the pictures/animations displayed inline, and use a link instead. (This way, it does not take up too much space and aniimation when you are not trying to display it.)
  • Use PNG or WebM instead of GIF.
(Free Hero Mesh - FOSS puzzle game engine)
calima
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by calima »

I use a niche webkit browser with no GPU acceleration. Perhaps if you spin up a VM with no GPU accel and try FF there, you'd see the high cpu usage.

CSS should allow nearest scaling, so if the forum lets you do that, you could keep the gifs at the original resolution, significantly reducing the size, but still letting people with 4k screens see them large.
calima
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Re: Large animated GIFs in posts

Post by calima »

I just tried that with one of your gifs. Original: 2.4mb, scaled to NES-size: 378kb.
CPU usage: original 12-15% (on a 6-core, meaning 75-94% of one core), new one scaled by 3x in the browser: 1%.
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