Imgur launches Video to Gif service
Animated Gifs seem to be everywhere these days. You find them posted on forums, on social networking sites, in chat messages, and even sites like YouTube have started to experiment with the generation of animated gifs.
Gifs have seen a revival in recent time which may seem puzzling to Internet users who had to endure them on homepages of the early Internet days.
One recent trend in regards to animated gifs is to turn them into videos instead and play them using HTML5 video.
This works as good as playing gif files directly in the browser but offers advantages such as smaller file sizes.
The highly popular image hosting and viewing service Imgur introduced the Gifv format some time ago.
Animated gifs uploaded to the service are automatically converted to the format and since it is a mp4 file at its core, it is reducing the file size of the gif significantly.
Imgur today launched the next chapter: a Video to Gif conversion service that supports hundreds of different video sites.
The service works in three easy steps:
- Paste a video url into the form on the start page of the video to gif service.
- Select the start and end time with the help of a slider that is displayed underneath the video. Add a caption to it as well if you want.
- Click on create gif and wait for the process to complete.
The conversion may take a while depending on the video source and interval that you want turned into an animated gif.
The resulting video is automatically hosted on Imgur where you get the usual sharing and display options.
If you want to know how this looks like, check out this Imgur page.
Video to Gif is currently available on the desktop version of Imgur. I have tested the feature with various video hosting sites including YouTube and Vimeo and all that I tested worked just fine.
As far as limitations are concerned, there are some however. The animated gifs cannot exceed 15 seconds playtime for example, there is only room for one caption and you cannot change the output resolution at all.
Imgur's Video to Gif service is not the only service that is tapping into the niche. There is Gif YouTube for example which works only on YouTube, Giphy which is a search engine for animated gifs and Gfycat which turns animated gifs into mp4 files.
Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?