Mastodon: Convert gifs to webm during upload

[Gargron]

WebM's are of smaller size and higher quality, so the cool thing would be to convert uploaded animated GIFs to WebMs before storing them.

I personally haven't figured out how to make Paperclip do that, yet.

[ticky]

(hey if you do this can you also make ‘em available as mp4s because otherwise I just won’t see gifs and that’ll be bad)

[noiob]

Yeah, webm is not supported on all platforms (i.e. Safari on mobile and Desktop). Is there any issue with just providing mp4 instead of webm?

[vjackson725]

An update:

I'm currently blocked with this approach because the paperclip av-transcoder extension doesn't work well when you transform the original file, erroring out on the security checks.

The paperclip Attachment processor seems to handle this okay, but I can't work out how it does that.

@Gargron submitted a question on stackoverflow.

Note that if we make this change, the videos won't autoplay because pictures are presented as a CSS background, and videos don't work with that, and get tumbnailed. Either videos would have to be handled differently, or we put an overlay on them to indicate they are a video, and you click-through to see it.

Also, I developed for webm because that was what was in the title, but I'd vote for mp4 as well.

[vjackson725]

good work! 🎉

[saper]

Well, it seems to me that this broken static gifs (https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/2108).

And actually we ended up with proprietary mp4 instead of webm

I think animated gif is much better supported :)