Pictures show up just fine while scrolling. Is there a way to do that for videos too?
EDIT: Updated based on additional background on catbox and reorganized the file formats
I’ll post some of my experiences so far. It’s important to note that this experience is changing with every upgrade. I use ScreenToGif to convert files, I haven’t used the gif format at all just webm, webp, and mp4:
File formats. For the most part the providers behave the same, I have noticed :
- webp will show an active video thumbnail, and open inline but has no sound
- webm will not show an active video thumbnail, has a smaller file size compared to webp, shows inline, and has no sound
- mp4 will have sound and opens inline, but does not have an active thumbnail (since 18.1)
Providers:
- Direct upload to lemmy
- uses server resources and probably not preferred
- some content just errors out on uploading for no apparent reason
- catbox.moe
- Seems to work ok but the service is sometimes slow or unavailable
- Has been around for 8 years
- redgifs.com
- After the 18.1 upgrade, now plays inline but videos don’t show up on the main page
- imgur.com
- videos don’t show on the main page, but will open inline
- prohibits nsfw content now, things will eventually get removed as they find that content
- gfycat.com
- shutting down soon
- youtube.com
- has the ability to be watched with the NSFW UI patch on here (one of the added expand features [shows on the site as a book] before the update to 18.1)
- This will probably return soon
Other services I’ve heard about but not tried:
- freeimage.host
- imgbox.com
- imgchest.com
- lensdump.com
- pixhost.to
- postimages.org
- pixelfed
So I’d probably say it’s between catbox and redgifs for me, but since moving here my login doesn’t work for redgifs so I don’t use it any more. I think redgifs blocked my account after I started linking to it from here but it seems like everyone else is fins so YMMV.
I’m very new to Lemmy and not sure how a lot of this works, but when I go to NSFW communities and see a post from redgifs, I don’t see a thumbnail and when I click on it it takes me to redgifs.com to play. Does that mean the server/instance I have an account on hasn’t updated to 18.1 yet? Or am I missing something?
maybe, do you have an example? I’m thinking it’s either that it hasn’t moved to 18.1 (check the bottom of the page) or that it could be linked to the redgifs page instead of the specific video
Good info thanks!
catbox is 8 years old
Good point, I hadn’t really checked it out. I’ll update my post
to add to this, youtube has the ability to be watched with the NSFW UI patch on lemmyNSFW (one of the added expand features [shows on the site as a book] before the update to 18.1)
I didn’t know that, good to know!
If someone wants to test https://saint.to/ and https://pixeldrain.com/, you get +10 house points.
pixeldrain doesn’t allow hotlinking/embedding files in their free plan according to the website.
