Real-time GIF images

I've found MJPEG to be more bandwidth intensive, especially as the resolution increases however, since its flushing the full frame every time (whereas with GIF you could send just the differences between frames).

I had a lot of fun making a little real-time visitor counter using Motion JPEG a few years ago! I was quite proud of that :)

The demo is still live:

http://drewgottlieb.net/2012/07/29/real-time-user-count.html

And regardless, I cannot support a project that I know will primarily be used to annoy the shit out of me in my own inbox.

You're right. Google changed the way they did images a while back to prevent email image marketers who used to track when the user opened an email using a 1pixel transparent image downloads.

Few month ago I tested this, and it's seems they do not cache. Instead they are just using proxy to enable anonymous download of the image. But you never it any cache from google directly.

From my testing, it seems like Gmail will cache via its proxy, but that cache respects the cache headers, so you can instruct Gmail how often to refresh the data.

(That, and you can cache-bust on a per user basis using a unique identifier in the query string.)

I have tested an image generated with this script in both Gmail and outlook clients and it works just fine. Else I wouldn't post it over here of course :)

It does work in gmail. Jetstar, an Australian air travel company, uses this technique (IIRC) and it works fine in gmail.

Comments say it's based on this: https://github.com/demouth/DmImage/blob/master/example/sampl...

Some of what you mentioned is already present there. Some other things are new. But they're both terrifying...

Extra details: the rewrite into gifencoder happened in 2007, so gifmerge must be older than that (maybe 4.x times). The original license forbids modifying gifmerge without author's approval - since this file doesn't mention it at all, I doubt dmimage is legal.

The classic coding book 'Code Complete' recommends adding spaces after and before brackets. The idea being the increased white space improves code readability.

I used to agree, but more recently have decided it ultimately ends up making things more difficult to read by increasing the amount of scanning your eyes need to do.

Oh, this is actually neat:

> what about progress bars for stuff that your server is doing in the background

This seems like a really good micro-service.

Yep, i was expecting OP's code to be the PHP implementation of that, but a quick look at index.php shows its not. Streaming gif frames, now thats what i call a live gif.

Yes, the idea is brilliant! But the purpose of my source code is to use "real-time" gif images in mail clients. Unfortunately, videlalvaro's solution is only possible for mail clients which support loading images from its original source. Google loads the images from their proxy, which downloads the images first. It DOES re-download each image at the moment you re-open the e-mail message, but it won't make it possible to manipulate the images real-time. I've tested it. It does work in clients like outlook, cause outlook shows the images from its original source, but gmail doesn't. So sending a gif image with a certain amount of frames is better, in my opinion.

When I read the title, the first thing I did was laugh and think about telling you to 'check this new thing out'.

First thing I thought of when I read the title were 1990s era webcams.

I don't think it is really funny. Hacks like this is how progress is delayed. Because why innovate when you can rely on "hacks that provably work in the real world"?

A guy I used to work with wrote a tiny JavaScript library that would write into GIF content to create motion graphics. It actually worked, in 1997.

A bit later, web browsers cleaned up their implementations, and it no longer works.

Good times, though.

If I read the source code correctly, this is not actually streaming something continuously; instead, it is making a 30-frame gif that has a start-time that is dependent on when you loaded the gif.

Additionally, GIF has only 256 colors.

not just trolling but could also be used for social engineering...

Now you can do it yourself haha ;) I still have to cleanup the code a bit. Thinking of creating a class which allows you to create such image by just writing a multidimensional array, so less code to write. But I couldn't wait to share this already so... But updates are coming soon.

Well, the purpose of the code is to use it in mail clients. And because mail clients don't allow you to use javaScript and such, using an image is the most obvious alternative.

Urmm, going by the filename ("GIFEncoder.class.php"), that's just the GIF Encoder. This post isn't about the ability to generate GIFs using PHP (as that class does), but about varying the content of the GIF on a per-request basis (in "real-time").

Looking at the git commit history, this was created ~2 days ago.

"Why are people upvoting something they didn't know about that I did know about?"

It has? Can you give an example?

This is generating a custom GIF file on the server. It's most likely been done by someone somewhere before, but not something I've been both gaming and forum-ing for a little while.