Metapost: I'm writing a guide and I have questions...

[dragontamer5788]

I'm writing a combinatory guide and would like it hosted on these forums. In particular, I'd like to have all of the GIFs that I'm making loaded on these forums and served out. Combinators are a very visual tool, so animations and diagrams are a must. I've written approximately 40% of the guide at the moment and have roughly 24 pictures available. The PNGs are small (only a few hundred kb). But about 15 of them are GIFs right now. Each GIF is 2MB to 5MB (after -k256 and -O3 optimization from Gifcicle). So image hosting will easily hit 100MB or maybe even 200MB by the time the guide is complete.

So yeah, it'd definitely take up a bit more bandwidth than the Image-heavy Train Guide. Now I know that I can upload to Gfycat, but relying on external hosting means less reliability. So I'd prefer to just upload all of the images as inline attachments to the forum post.

If this is too abstract for people to understand... my first few sections of the guide are in draft-form. (All pictures are done, just editing for better readability right now). I can upload it so that people get a better idea of the bandwidth requirements. Another possibility: I can break up the guide into multiple topics (aka: Part1, Part2, Part3, etc. etc.) which would reduce bandwidth requirements. I have approximately three sections (first section has one picture for the introduction. The other two sections have about ~10-images each)

Anyone have a good methodology for this kind of guide?

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I'm posting this in "Gameplay help" because I plan on writing the guide and posting it here, in "Gameplay Help". I couldn't think of a better subforum to place this question into... sorry if there's a better spot to ask this question. I couldn't think of one.

[DaveMcW]

Do you really need GIFs? For people on low bandwidth, it sucks as much to download them as for you to upload them.

[Klonan]

I think its best to upload to gfycat, you can embed directly on the forum here using the tags [webm] or [mp4],

Gifs are rather large and outdated, and we'd prefer not to host them here, as it might end up as several hundred gigabytes of traffic if your guide is popular

I've never had a problem with external hosting, and you can always keep backups and re-upload.

[dragontamer5788]

Do you really need GIFs? For people on low bandwidth, it sucks as much to download them as for you to upload them.

Webm and MP4 would be smaller, but I don't think those work on forums.

GIF has utterly awful compression, but its kind of what I have to work with. I wouldn't mind pulling out my FRAPs and creating MP4 and Webm videos and redoing my work (<video> with MP4 / Webm basically covers all web browsers), but the issue with that is hosting. I do have a personal webserver, but I don't want the responsibility of hosting it perpetually. This guide would be something I'd like to "give" to the Factorio community. Forums are surprisingly useful places for guides of this manner, so that's why I'm thinking of the GIF methodology with upload-attachments.

[dragontamer5788]

I think its best to upload to gfycat, you can embed directly on the forum here using the tags [webm] or [mp4]

I'm not 100% familiar with this methodology. Does it work cross-browser just fine?

If that's how Gfycat works, then that's probably the least-bad option, provided that the various web-browsers will accept webm and/or mp4. Do you have example BBCode of this working cross-browser?

[dragontamer5788]

I think its best to upload to gfycat, you can embed directly on the forum here using the tags [webm] or [mp4]

I'm not 100% familiar with this methodology. Does it work cross-browser just fine?

If that's how Gfycat works, then that's probably the least-bad option, provided that the various web-browsers will accept webm and/or mp4. Do you have example BBCode of this working cross-browser?

Hmm, I looked at this topic and the webm video fails to load under Internet Explorer 11. I don't think the [webm] tag would work out cross-browser. Worse is that there's a "webm hole". I'm not really seeing how I can accomplish decent animated videos using those tags.

[siggboy]

I think you should make animated GIFs, host those externally and link them with the img tag.

If the video needs to be large, you can embed it in another way or just provide a link. I think you should keep the GIFs small so they can be inlined (keep in mind that it doesn't matter if they're hosted externally or not, the user still has to load them).