-
Not sure it can be done on here.
Have you seen what it is? It's not an image format at all, it's a web page embedded as an iFrame of the size of the video, and then containing multiple tags for different browsers of different capabilities.
Instead of just asking you for a .gif URL, I'd have to ask for a URL of each type of media that each browser supports, including the .webm and .mp4 and the original .gif.
Then, if the image was 3rd party hosted I wouldn't know the size to display it at, so I'd need to ask you that too.
ImgUR don't have to do this, as they just take an upload and do a whole load of video conversion work.
So to support .gifv as ImgUR does... it means adding a video transcoding platform to the backend, and then storing all versions of the output, and producing the embed widget, and using that in the page.
It's an extremely convoluted 'spec', and the whole thing is just a set of hacks and workarounds for their specific scenario.
It works for them as the bandwidth costs are so severe that the savings are worth this mess. They literally have millions of dollars spare to pay for all of this because they save that bandwidth. For us as a small site, this bandwidth save won't save us even £1, so any investment in the video transcoding is a further loss we'd have to incur.
It just makes no sense, technically or financially.
@Velocio I really think .gifv should be supported. It kind of encapsulates webm and mp4 if I understand correctly. http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
More and more gifs are actually embedded gifv videos and the bandwidth savings are pretty intense. If we could just link to them as images or if regular links to them became embedded a la youtube it would help things.