Gifs not loading

Meta
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For the last couple of days the message window converts uploaded gifs to jpg which kinda defeats the purpose of a gif.
Normally the forum allows direct upload from your computer, but now I have to upload to an external site and insert using bb code.

Might just be an issue on my end. Anyone else?

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Thanks to @Box 's idea, with an external share service, to insert the animated GIF use the BBCode link.
I also discovered that Markdown works also.

//update - It seems that after a short time it also transforms these GIFs from links into JPEG images.

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Hello, yup I had the same problem. I had to rename my gif and it worked. Did it 5 times everytime it changed into jpg.
Another one would upload in gif successfully but was not animated unless we clicked on it.

I’m on Firefox, I did not try chrome

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Test: Drag and drop gif

oldnewicon
oldnewicon800×600 278 KB

Edit: Looks okay with Chrome. :innocent:

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As @mihai.s has pointed out even the workaround of using an external link gets changed to a jpeg after a random time.
This is a significant issue and needs to be addressed.

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_In meta.discourse: https://meta.discourse.org/t/gifs-embedded-in-posts-paused-after-locally-downloaded/177441_ …

@sam ?

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I have been running my .gif files through Optimize animated GIF which appears to sidestep the problem somehow. Probably because it is altering the color profile? But for whatever reason optimized gifs do not seem get converted to .jpgs, or at least have not so far, one of them is a few days old and still working. Hope this is fixed soon.

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This is becoming quite annoying! in a recent post one of @Box’s animated gifs still runs whereas a second one doesn’t. The link @DanRathbun posted earlier seems to say that discourse thinks they have solved this, but it isn’t fixed on this forum! Is nobody from discourse listening?

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I see also blank space where people have posted links to 3D Warehouse models that should be showing the 3D view you can orbit. I wonder if it’s related.

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I sort of read that differently, it came across to me ( i may well have read it wrong) that they(Discourse) had been changing things around in the software and it was down to the individual Forum users (trimble, not each one of us) to ‘rebuild’ their sites to incorporate the changes.
They basically said, Gifs are a problem and there are much better options.
Without gifs my posts will become few and far between.

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Could be. But it didn’t seem like they offered a usable alternative for animations.

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Just scanned the thread again and they say

GIF is a complicated format, and there are better options nowadays like MP4 and WEBP for most applications.

Then in the last post of the thread they say

The fix for your problem has been accepted and it is now available in the latest version.

So perhaps they just need to update the forum software here. That was posted 5 days after I started this thread.

@jody is this something you can fix?

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I’ll have to do a search, but right now I don’t know of a simple way to do a screen capture animation in mp4 or webp. Those seem to me to be geared more to ways to embed videos in a website than to share screen captures. Anyone have suggestions of easy to use capture tools for those formats?

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Screenpresso is one option I think.
Doesn’t mac have quicktime or something that defaults to MP4?

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I’ve only seen QuickTime used for whole screen recording, which for my retina screen would surely be heavier than a 500x500 gif! I’ll take a look later to see if a partial screen can be done as easily as LICECap.

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not suggesting any of these options would be better for our screen grabs, I find the gif format perfect for this, but others believe that everything should be like youtube and facebook. Even Facebook now converts my gifs to video.

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Experimenting with the macOS built-in screen recorder that is started via cmd-shift-5.

Question #1: the recorder natively generates a .mov file. Can the discourse software handle this format properly? Uploading a sample below to see what happens

Discourse accepts it but evidently doesn’t know how to play it. It shows as a frame with a camera icon superimposed. You have to click to see the animation, but then it does work.

Question #2: what if I convert the .mov to an .mp4 using a free utility?

Same handling: click to view.

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Thanks for the command-shift-5 tip, I usually do a start screen recording in QuickTime Player, which has the advantage that you’re immediately in QuickTime Player ready to trim the video or remove parts from it. Still, with the command-shift-5 approach you can get to that state by opening the screen recording file on your desktop.

As you can see now, although the initial insertion shows a camera icon, it does get to grips with the file after a while, and the thumbnail and play button shows up.

1 Like
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If you tell cmd-shift-5 to place the recording on the desktop, it will dwell there for a while in a sort of “pending” state. If you click that icon, it opens in a previewer. In that previewer, you can clip out frames from the start and the end.

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for the ones using “screen to gif” on PC (which I use), it seems saving Gif in 1.0 (NeuQuant algorithm) rather than 2.0 (octree algorithm) solves the problem.

Capture