Does this website support animated gifs for profile icons?

Found an issue with the phpBB system here at NESdev? Use this forum to report problems.

Moderator: Moderators

User avatar
Drew Sebastino
Formerly Espozo
Posts: 3496
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2014 4:35 pm
Location: Richmond, Virginia

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Better than a live action one... :lol:

Anyway, it's all good now. I got an imgur profile for this sole purpose. :lol:
User avatar
rainwarrior
Posts: 8732
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:03 pm
Location: Canada
Contact:

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by rainwarrior »

345k for that.
User avatar
Drew Sebastino
Formerly Espozo
Posts: 3496
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2014 4:35 pm
Location: Richmond, Virginia

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Very little, I know. :lol:

...Now that I look at it though, it's a bit distracting... :lol:
JRoatch
Formerly 43110
Posts: 422
Joined: Wed Feb 05, 2014 7:01 am
Contact:

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by JRoatch »

To follow up with the excavation of my old files, I did not find what my animated GIF would of been without the hack filter but I imagine it was probably about 300KB.
I did however find my image prepossessing program that made the temporal lossyness.
In pseudocode it basically did this to each frame before they were inputed into GIMP for conversion to GIF:

Code: Select all

gray(pixel) -> (pixel.R*0.299 + pixel.G*0.587 + pixel.B*0.114)

For each pixel in previous and current images:
    If abs( gray(previous) - gray(current) ) < 8:
        current = previous
    else:
        current = current
Nate to self: Never again leave your folders and files nameless (like "New Bitmap (2).bmp" in folder "temp5"), it makes them very hard to search for after 10 years.
User avatar
koitsu
Posts: 4201
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 9:28 pm
Location: A world gone mad

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by koitsu »

Yeah, great: Content-Length: 354004. That isn't gonna piss anyone off on a latent connection, mobile, or cellular data. imgur also doesn't support gzip or deflate compression, so it's a full 354KB no matter what:

Code: Select all

> HEAD /wmxKWiQ.gif HTTP/1.1
> Host: i.imgur.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.48.0
> Accept: */*
> Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Last-Modified: Sun, 17 Apr 2016 18:57:17 GMT
< ETag: "181eb36f151da7a026dde5aac5281817"
< Content-Type: image/gif
< Fastly-Debug-Digest: eea700f0d6188db8a6c632620373f6a893f364187d2991ba8b1cdbfafd69224f
< cache-control: public, max-age=31536000
< Content-Length: 354004
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2016 21:21:01 GMT
< Age: 8621
< Connection: keep-alive
< X-Served-By: cache-iad2132-IAD, cache-sjc3124-SJC
< X-Cache: HIT, HIT
< X-Cache-Hits: 1, 1
< X-Timer: S1460928061.191844,VS0,VE0
< Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, OPTIONS
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
< Server: cat factory 1.0
*double facepalm* At least it's hosted at imgur and not an upload here (I don't think the forum avatar upload would allow such sizes, I forget what we set the limit at).

As for "small-ifying a GIF", ImageMagick has an entire page dedicated to just that. If you have source material in a video format (ex. you want to convert AVI and a codec ImageMagick understands to GIF), there's a page on that too.
lidnariq
Posts: 11432
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2008 11:12 am

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by lidnariq »

koitsu wrote:Yeah, great: Content-Length: 354004. That isn't gonna piss anyone off on a latent connection, mobile, or cellular data.
I already added it to my adblock list....
imgur also doesn't support gzip or deflate compression, so it's a full 354KB no matter what:
To be fair, the image formats hosted by imgur already use compression; there's not going to be much incremental improvement other than compressing GIF's (normally uncompressed) palette.
User avatar
koitsu
Posts: 4201
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 9:28 pm
Location: A world gone mad

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by koitsu »

lidnariq wrote:To be fair, the image formats hosted by imgur already use compression; there's not going to be much incremental improvement other than compressing GIF's (normally uncompressed) palette.
You're right, I forgot about that. I'll play tepples for a moment: but not all GIFs (animated or otherwise) use LZ77/LZW compression due to the patent debate. Sure, that patent expired in 2004, but there's really no way to guarantee every GIF file ever created is using compression, or that whatever was used to create a GIF present-day makes use of LZW or not (software being used may be "old" and by default *not* use LZW due to the patent concerns, and user has no idea that they should turn it on).

That said: use of deflate or gzip on GIFs using LZW can/does help. On Espozo's avatar, the actual transferred payload goes from 345KBytes to 306KBytes (39KB savings) using gzip (and I did turn on DEFLATE/gzip for .gif files in this context). In other words: gzip's compression model seems to work semi-well on this file, despite it using LZW (I checked):

Code: Select all

$ curl --output /dev/null http://www.home.lan/wmxKWiQ.gif
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  345k  100  345k    0     0  48.7M      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 56.2M

$ curl --compressed --output /dev/null http://www.home.lan/wmxKWiQ.gif
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  306k    0  306k    0     0  9826k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 9884k
Verification of LZW use in that GIF:

Code: Select all

D:\downloads\ImageMagick>identify -verbose wmxKWiQ.gif | grep -c "Compression: LZW"
50
Anyway, point is: animated GIFs (especially ones with lots of frames or visuals) are extremely annoying, waste bandwidth, and really bring absolutely nothing to the table. When I was younger (back in the days when animated GIFs were the hot new thing), sure, I made several myself and they were prolific (esp. on Geocities). Those of us from that era now find them quite annoying (cuz people do stupid things like make 2-3MByte animated GIFs from portions of an anime, for example), especially if hosted by infrastructures or platforms which don't support caching. I myself do use an animated GIF avatar on occasion, but guess how big the file is? 3.9KBytes; I think it's like 4 frames of animation (edit: it's 6). Not too distracting either.
User avatar
Bregalad
Posts: 8056
Joined: Fri Nov 12, 2004 2:49 pm
Location: Divonne-les-bains, France

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by Bregalad »

Does this website support animated gifs for profile icons?
Am I the only one who wish those were banned? I find those to be extremely annoying. In a few cases, like when the animation is really subtle it could be acceptable, but in, say, 85% of cases, animated gifs as avatar really annoys me.
User avatar
rainwarrior
Posts: 8732
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:03 pm
Location: Canada
Contact:

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by rainwarrior »

koitsu wrote:I don't think the forum avatar upload would allow such sizes, I forget what we set the limit at.
It's 20k.

Don't worry, though, this ugly distracting animation is worth more than 17 other avatars. Believe me.
User avatar
rainwarrior
Posts: 8732
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:03 pm
Location: Canada
Contact:

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by rainwarrior »

koitsu wrote:That isn't gonna piss anyone off on a latent connection, mobile, or cellular data.
Yeah, I've got 200mb on my cell phone, so the thought of an extra 330k just for reading an NesDev thread featuring Espozo doesn't thrill me.
User avatar
Kasumi
Posts: 1293
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2008 2:09 pm

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by Kasumi »

161KB
Image
82KB
Image
There are certainly ways to get it even smaller but... eh.
Edit: Mine's currently 4KB, but it can apparently be 1,273 bytes with absolutely no changes. I think I'd rather just reanimate it at some point if I ever change it.
Edit2: For completeness, here's one that's 300KB and 100% the same visually (I think):
Image
User avatar
Drew Sebastino
Formerly Espozo
Posts: 3496
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2014 4:35 pm
Location: Richmond, Virginia

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by Drew Sebastino »

rainwarrior wrote:I've got 200mb on my cell phone, so the thought of an extra 330k just for reading an NesDev thread featuring Espozo doesn't thrill me.
That's your problem. :lol:
lidnariq wrote:I already added it to my adblock list....
koitsu wrote:animated GIFs (especially ones with lots of frames or visuals) are extremely annoying, waste bandwidth, and really bring absolutely nothing to the table.
Bregalad wrote:Am I the only one who wish those were banned? I find those to be extremely annoying.
rainwarrior wrote:this ugly distracting animation
It's nice to know you guys like it. :lol: If it's truly the largest dilemma since WWII, I'll just revert back.
User avatar
tokumaru
Posts: 12427
Joined: Sat Feb 12, 2005 9:43 pm
Location: Rio de Janeiro - Brazil

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by tokumaru »

I do find your new avatar pretty distracting and slightly annoying. When you asked about animated avatars I imagined you were going to make something original and relevant, not rip a video that wasn't made for small viewports and doesn't even loop. Not looping is a serious offense in an animated avatar, because it constantly draws attention when the animation wraps back to the beginning.
tepples
Posts: 22708
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 11:12 pm
Location: NE Indiana, USA (NTSC)
Contact:

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by tepples »

Espozo wrote:
rainwarrior wrote:I've got 200mb on my cell phone, so the thought of an extra 330k just for reading an NesDev thread featuring Espozo doesn't thrill me.
That's your problem. :lol:
And unless you're willing to help solve the problem by paying rainwarrior's overage fees, you are part of the problem. Occasionally I tether my laptop to my aunt's phone when we go on long trips, and when I tether, I stick to low-bandwidth sites such as forums.nesdev.com. (I also turn on Firefox's tracking protection for its side effect of blocking advertisers that track users' interests across sites, which has the side effect of blocking the most data-heavy ads.) So with two admitted occasional users of cellular Internet here and a distracting rewind, I may end up taking one representative frame from the GIF to produce a PNG avatar.
User avatar
Drew Sebastino
Formerly Espozo
Posts: 3496
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2014 4:35 pm
Location: Richmond, Virginia

Re: Does this website support animated gifs for profile icon

Post by Drew Sebastino »

I imagined you were going to make something original and relevant
My last avatar wasn't either. :lol: Anyway, when I get home, I'll change it. I don't know what else to use though, probably just the other one.
Post Reply