• data1701d (He/Him)OPEnglish
    4•1 day ago

    Mostly with posting the APNG - Lemmy doesn’t seem to natively support them in thumbnails. You CAN embed the image in the post and put a different format in the thumbnail, but that sort of beats the purpose. The caveat is you have to set the extension to PNG, or Lemmy won’t accept it.

    Also, while single-frame PNGS have an acceptable compression ratios, APNG files start to get large - a dozen or few dozen megabytes. Really, it doesn’t take that much time to load most times, but it’s long enough that people might miss it.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 day ago

      APNG files start to get large - a dozen or few dozen megabytes

      I just messed around with using ffmpeg to convert that MP4 to both APNG and WEBP, and the size difference was substantial, but definitely not that bad.

      • MP4
        • 60.4 KiB
        • klingon-jump-rope.mp4
      • APNG
        • 1.6 MiB
        • ffmpeg -i klingon-jump-rope.mp4 -plays 0 klingon-jump-rope.apng
      • WEBP
        • 110.9 KiB
        • ffmpeg -i klingon-jump-rope.mp4 -loop 0 klingon-jump-rope.webp
      • WEBM
        • 59.9 KiB
        • ffmpeg -i klingon-jump-rope.mp4 klingon-jump-rope.webm

      EDIT: Oh, right, “few dozen megabytes” probably refers to some other animation you had made. Still, you are right, WEBP seems to be the way to go.

      • data1701d (He/Him)OPEnglish
        5•1 day ago

        I think part of my Prodigy meme problem was I tried to encode in a bit too high a resolution (720x480). When retesting it today, I had a 49.1 MiB file, verses with a WEBP encoded at quality level 90, I got it down to 3 megabytes while still looking pretty good. I also kept having an issue with APNG white lines that I could never figure out.

        Also, the WEBP was a bit larger than that - I wasn’t satisfied with FFMPEG’s default quality level of 75, so I experimented and decided on 97, getting a size of 333.8 KiB.

        P.S For funzies, here’s the WEBP version of that Prodigy meme I was talking about (done in 85):