Replace gif with webm, or allow youtube/vimeo/sketchfab/etc videos as previews
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Chaser Zaks
Currently, creators can upload gifs to their marketplace listings (Limit 1 I think?).
GIFs are heavy, even if they are low quality and low frame rate. That's three cons: Low frame rate, low quality, and heavy bandwidth wise.
Many sites, including Tenor, Giphy, Reddit, and Discord, convert to gifs to webm when possible. However, they also allow uploading of webms now.
The benefit is the low size of webms while retaining relatively good quality and frame rate.
This will allow creators to better demonstrate their objects, especially animated objects, animations, or otherwise show case special features of a product with extended play time, quality, and resolution, while still maintaining a less than 1 megabyte upload limit.
The server can use ffmpeg to sanitize webm uploads (I.E. remove audio, constrain resolution, etc), as many other sites do.
The upload limit could be addressed separately.
Alternatively, allowing linking of youtube, vimeo, sketchfab, etc as a preview. This offloads the need to host the video, though this means the video can disappear at any time.
I feel that this is important, as gifs are a underutilized feature on the marketplace, which I feel is in part due to the low quality of them, and the fact it doesn't do the product it is advertising justice.
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Lucky Clover
As long as we can still Upload the gifs and they're just converted server-side, as people are used to making gifs more and most don't even know how webms are made, yes!
Webm is a great format and it's supported by all browsers these days as far as I know, and would give us the bonus of, as far as users are concerned, just gifs that don't autoplay and can be paused. WebP is a direct gif replacement, but WebM would allow the option of audio as well.
You already can't set a gif as the main thumbnail, iirc gifs are even something you have to click on manually? so that wouldn't be a concern.
This would allow for better quality over gifs, smaller filesizes, and I'd assume any audio from a user-made webm file would be muted by default, but would then allow for people to essentially put entire (very quick) guides on the listings, if the filesize is small enough. I made a guide for a product that's less than 2 minutes long, could probably be pretty small in that format, but had to make a youtube account just for one video that way. I'd absolutely love the ability to just have it in the listings themselves if short and small enough!
Zia Underwood
please no webm
Peter Stindberg
Feels as if that has been suggested before, but makes total sense.
Just... please no animation on the main pic of an item. Imagine a page full of 96 moving thumbnails.
Spidey Linden
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Issue tracked. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future updates here.