Over the past few months we’ve had a couple of queries about how animated graphics work here. I have to confess, I don’t know. The advice from the makers of Discourse is vague, and is subject to Administrative permissions (which we don’t have access to) in any case. So I thought I’d do some experiments.
I’ll be posting some animated files here - some I’ve made, and some I’ve found. It would be helpful if you could report back, and say whether they work for you.
By all means post your own animations - it all helps the test. If you do post files, please include basic file information, like file size, and animation type (GIF, APNG, etc).
NOTE - Animation files that don’t work are just as important as those that do - perhaps even more so. If you find you can’t even upload yoour animation, please post the file information anyway, together with a note that it wouldn’t load. I’m trying to find out what works, and what doesn’t.
Cat gif (it’s a friend’s, I forgot the name..) was 278kb and the failed one was 6MB :-o HEVC. Okay maybe it was too large. It technically had an audiotrack, that increased the size.
I was experimenting with ios features. If I really wanted to upload it, I would use a different method.
Well, that’s the point of the thread - so we can find out what works. As I said, in that respect, files that don’t work are just as important to know about, so thanks for your efforts.
OK, I’ve got some preliminary results, based on Discourse guidance and tests done here.
The overriding factor seems to be file size. Discourse will not accept an image file (or an animation) of more than 4 megabytes. By modern standards, that’s tiny. Nowadays, websites are hosting whole movies rendered as .GIF files, and some of them run to thousands of megabytes - but hey, it is what it is.
The other factor is file format. Discourse will only accept images (including animations) in the following formats: .JPG, .PNG, .GIF, HEIC, .HEIF, .WEBP, AVIF, .SVG.
Now I don’t know of software that will create .HEIC, .HEIF, or AVIF - and I’ve never seen them in the wild - so I think it’s safe to ignore them as an option. .SVG is a specialist vector drawing format, and not used for movies.
So for creating and posting animations here, I suggest the following:
I assume these HEIC etc. formats are output by certain phones, those might be the ones that contain whole movies? Most people don’t even know which format they use because the suffix isn’t visible.
How do you record these NMS “GIFs” off the screen? I know I can use the Windows gamebar for fullscreen, and Windows key+Shift+S lets me take cropped screenshots, and has a video toggle for cropped video. For me that makes MP4 or GIF.
Is there a save-as PNG or WebP option?
I was part of a Discord conversation about a similar topic recently, we never figured it out:
In a Discord were two channels, memes and pets, where most posts were made by the same person. And he got responses like “when you post, the audio plays, but the video is stuck!” It wasn’t 100% of the posts, some videos played normally. One third responded “works for me, just use the mobile app!” and the last third responded “works for me, just use the Desktop app!”
He probably forwarded the clips from various sources, and they either were already converted, or his device converted them, and some compression formats were not supported.
So it’s good you are asking this citizen scientist question, I never got any info out of the memers which formats or devices they used.
The creation of short animations is something of a black art. There are a variety of free online tools, but I don’t trust online services, and I won’t use them. Then there are paid-for programs like Adobe, which will happily create animations, but cost a fortune.
I use free software - but only from approved FOSS sources. There’s no one app that will do the whole job. I generally find myself bouncing between Paint-Net (I can’t put the dot in here), Shotcut, Handbrake, OBS, Nvidia Screen Grabber, GIMP, ScreenToGif, FFMPEG, and Losslesscut.
There’s a variety of GUI front ends available for FFMPEG - which can be a nightmare from the command line.
Paint Net may seem basic and simple when you first try it - as, indeed, it is - but it has a huge following, and there’s a whole community of programmers producing plugins and extensions for it. The same is true of GIMP. If the plain vanilla program won’t do what you want, chances are there’s a plugin that will enable it.
Bear in mind, the animations I’ve posted here were never intended to be works of art. They’re quick and dirty test pieces.
There are at least two implementations of animated JPEG. Motion JPEG is primarily a video standard, used in cheaper low-res cameras. The more modern implementation is JPEG XL, an image format which supports animation. JPEG XL is fairly new, and has not, as yet, been widely adopted. It is, nevertheless, supported by several browsers.
My silly mobile Safari passed all but the last test - animation support! Grrr.
JPEGXL https://jpegxl.info/images/anim-icos.jxl
webP
APNG
GIF
Meaning, it’s not the forum’s fault, a lacking image could also be the browser’s fault.
I downloaded the JPEG XL file. It won’t open in Firefox or VLC. Paint Net and GIMP will open it, but only as a still image. XNview will open it as an animation, so will IfranView.
I know I can use the Windows gamebar for fullscreen, and Windows key+Shift+S lets me take cropped screenshots, and has a video toggle for cropped video. For me that makes MP4 or GIF.
