I just attempted to upload a GIF movie to my image folder and although it played properly it continually flashed in its thumbnail form,it was so bad I have had to delete it before I cause epileptic fits or seizures. Would it be at all possible to include WMV movie format (obviously still within the 2 megabyte size limit)?
Hi Alun,
I’m sorry to hear you’ve been having trouble.
There is a bug that I’m aware of that the teaser images for GIF animations can sometimes get messed up in the way you describe. Unfortunately this is a bug in the underlying software that is used to generate the thumbnails (ImageMagick), and so I think it’s rather difficult to fix without switching to using different software, which would clearly be quite a large job. It’s on my to-do list to look into it, but unfortunately fixing it is likely to be a long-term project.
Unfortunately, we’re also unlikely to allow members to post video files into the BAA image gallery in the near future. While I realise this a frequently-requested feature (it’s already been discussed in at least one other forum thread recently), hosting galleries of video files is a very different problem to hosting image galleries. The trouble is that video comes in all sorts of different formats (WMV, MP2, MP4, OGGV, WEBM, AVI, MOV… to name a handful that come to mind). Most of those are not compatible with all web browsers and operating systems. In fact, the only ones which are (almost) universally compatible are MP4 and WEBM. Even then, you need to use very specific encoding settings (called H.264 if you want the full gory details), and so if we allowed users to upload MP4 files, we’d doubtless receive files some people couldn’t view. Websites like YouTube have very clever software behind the scenes which converts whatever video file you upload into an appropriate format that the viewer’s computer can accept. So, in order to allow video uploads to the BAA site, we’d need to do an awful lot of work to reproduce that. And we’d no doubt receive lots of user feedback that such-and-such video file wasn’t working, for some deeply technical reason.
So, for the time being, I think our advice remains that it’s best to upload your videos to a personal YouTube account, and then you can post a web link to it in the BAA Observation Gallery, along with a still image from the video.
Sorry we can’t be more helpful currently,
Dominic
