I would suggest having the pink bar (that indicates the current length) grey out after 5 seconds of time, so if the selected portion is 10 seconds long have 50% of it grey.
I've used another site for this before (called Gifsoup: http://gifsoup.com/) and they charge about $5/m for the option to make longer gifs with no watermark, I think this would be something you could offer. I would definitely convert as I prefer your interface.
edit: The gif quality is pretty terrible, can that be improved?
edit edit: If you click "post to forgif.me" and then have to login and then login it loses the URL, you have to go back to find it again and click the button again.
Yes, we were already thinking about providing such a premium service, we'll see what we can do. Right now it's just an experiment, let's hope it'll get bigger :)
Edit: We slice the video into frames by using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, the gif encoder of ffmpeg uses a pretty bad color palette, I already dived into the encoder code but didn't manage to improve it. I'll work on it though.
Edit edit: Yup, known issue, gotta fix that today!
Prepare to have your bandwidth obliterated. You'll need to pay for way better hosting, people are literally going to hotlink you to death.
I'm not sure if your downloading process has a progress bar, but I suggest you implement one to keep impatient people from leaving (it looks like you do, but your server just might be unresponsive at the moment).
Your hosting bill is going to add up quick if you want to keep the service live and as is, so I suggest you implement a premium service. I don't think GIFs are a particularly profitable business, but we had fun with it, and its cool to see our watermarked GIFs on random places like Reddit. Enjoy!
maybe this will help http://27smiles.com/2008/05/22/setting-up-nginx-with-rails/
I agree with other(s) when I say the quality is quite terrible, but hopefully some tweaks with FFMPEG, or maybe even another route.
I do like the neatness and unobtrusive-ness of the watermark though.
I think over all, it shows a lot of promise, but need to fine tune those UI controls and make it clearer/easier to select a timeframe, and improve the quality of the GIF somewhat too :)
I guess the first thing I will do is add an instruction video or a short tutorial to make clear what the controls are there for.
The problem with Firefox is that the videos we are getting from YouTube and Vimeo are MP4. Since Firefox does not support the h264 codec right now, I had to implement a flash fallback which is not responsive at all. I wonder why people still use Firefox, though :P
I'll take some time tomorrow to have a closer look at the gif encoding code of FFmpeg to make it use another color palette. This is quite complicated though, so it might take some time. For now, we have to consider ourselves satisfied with the quality :(
Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!
The 2 usability recommendations I would add are:
1) Tell me how long my video clip is. (Don't make me keep guessing if I am in the 5 second range).
2) After creating the gif, if I don't like it let me go back to the editing screen with the last settings I used. I trimmed a youtube video down in the editor, but when the gif was created a few extra frames seemed to appear in the final product.
This can be easily changed by using the integrated disposal methods in a gif, as shown on http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/wdesign/ch23_05.htm , but afaik ffmpeg does not support this out of the box.
It seems imagemagick is able to do some basic optimization, as shown on http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt .
Everything is done client side, it uses web workers to render the gif so it doesn't block the UI and it's fast.
