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Why don't my gifv links work properly?

KFCeytron·12/8/2018, 7:27:30 PM·1 votes·3,457 views

The short videos I upload to Imgur for conversion into the gifv format don't autoplay properly here - they can't even be played in the modal popup. They only play when visiting the actual Imgur page. And when you do click through to that page, it goes to the imgur.com/image_id page that wraps the video, not the i.imgur.com/image_id.gifv direct link that I posted. I get the same result whether I'm posting them in a new thread or as a reply to an existing thread. Here's an example:

https://i.imgur.com/uD7K2Hk.gifv

My videos are encoded with H264 in an mp4 container. What do I have to do differently, whether in my Boards post, the video creation process, or the Imgur upload process, to ensure that these work properly?

EDIT: Trying the closing img tag (didn't think it was necessary for gifv):

https://i.imgur.com/uD7K2Hk.gifv[/img]

EDIT: If you turn your video into a gif so Imgur can turn it back into a video, it'll autoplay, but if it's the first post of a thread, you'll still have that big Imgur wrapper in the preview, apparently. I've even seen jpgs from Imgur fail on Boards nowadays, though, so I guess that's a thing.

12 Comments

Modmichaelchan12/8/2018, 7:44:06 PM1 votes

I'm at a loss. I'd write it off simply as a limitation of either imgur or the embedding package that the Boards uses.

Sorry I don't have better news.

Modi12/9/2018, 2:07:43 AM1 votes

From Imgur

#What is GIFV? GIFVs have the high quality of a video mixed with the simple functionality of a GIF. This means they

  • load quickly
  • loop forever
  • and have no sound--just like a GIF!

All GIFs over 2MB will be converted to GIFV on upload. You can upload GIFs up to 200MB.

The converted videos are significantly smaller than their equivalent GIFs, which allows them to load at lightning-fast speeds with better quality. Like all GIFs, there is no sound. By lowering bandwidth consumption, the change also optimizes Imgur for users on mobile. Rejoice!

The biggest issues I see here are:

  • Large GIFs (larger than 2MB) are automatically converted to a GIFV
  • Technically speaking, GIFV is a video format (requiring a <video> tag)
  • The boards does not seem to support embedding videos in that manner
  • Imgur does not seem to support automatic generation of GIFs from uploaded MP4 videos (which yours appears to be).
KFCeytron12/9/2018, 11:56:23 PM1 votes

Okay, here's a video that I exported to gif (sigh) which Imgur then converted back to a video with gifv (double sigh):

https://i.imgur.com/y7vWJIZ.gifv

ez mental boom12/10/2018, 12:02:19 AM1 votes

Just chop off the v and add open and close square brackets https://i.imgur.com/uD7K2Hk.gif[]

(edit) ok it used to work, dunno what to tell ya

KFCeytron12/10/2018, 6:53:17 PM1 votes

Made this one the exact same way as the working one above. But it doesn't autoplay...

https://i.imgur.com/oLxdbvn.gifv