On: Time.gif

[oxymoron]

I did the same thing about fifteen years ago by generating a mJPEG stream from a PHP-script. As far as I can remember, it seemed more reliable than using GIF. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG

[jbochi → oxymoron]

MJPEG is indeed much better for this. It uses less bandwidth (GIFs have no compression) and less browser memory (old frames can be discarded). When I was at globo.com, we developed this to serve animated thumbnails for live video streams: https://github.com/jbochi/live_thumb

[Tepix → jbochi]

GIF features lossless LZW compression.

[icebraining → oxymoron]

The main advantage is that, because a video format rather than an image that can loop, the player can discard past frames. The GIF method is probably constantly leaking memory.

[dom0 → icebraining]

> The GIF method is probably constantly leaking memory.

If the browser only keeps compressed frames, 16 GB will last for more than a year.

[tylerhou → icebraining]

GIFs can be non looping, but I'm not sure whether that flag is set at the beginning or end of the format.

[avereveard → icebraining]

yeah was wondering at what point chrome would give up, but the gif is only around 250kb per minute (0.004Mb/s)