brunoluiz / gifsane-extension

⏯ Converts GIFs to sane controllable embed video players

GIFSane

Converts GIFs to sane controllable embed video players Basically does something browsers should do natively. If your favourite platform doesn't convert user GIFs into videos, this extension will help you.

The animation above uses WebM (more optimised than GIF) which is not currently supported for now

Install

Due to the usage of WASM, is a bit tricky to upload this extension into web extension stores.

• Chrome and other Chromium browsers

  • Go to chrome://extensions/
  • Enable the Developer mode (toggle on top right corner)
  • Load unpacked and point to the extension folder

• Firefox:

  • Run npm run link:firefox (or run the script present on the package.json script for this task)
  • Go to about:debugging
  • Load temporary add-on... and point to the extension manifest.json

Try it out

Here is a short GIF you can try to convert once you install the extension. You need to Right Click -> GIFSane and choose your preferred conversion method.

Caveats

• It uses ffmpeg.wasm, which is quite slow for long videos
• It uses Manifest V2 because some WASM CSP directives are not implemented and ffmpeg.wasm uses document selectors within its code. To port it to Manifest V3, the code will need to be placed in a worker which doesn't have access to the DOM (document).
• It can't be published on Chrome Store due to Manifest V2 :)
• It will stop working in January 2023 in Chrome if this can't be ported to Manifest V3.

Related notes and blog posts

• GIFs (sane) playback control using WASM and FFmpeg: how it was implemented, and some caveats and tricks that were required during the implementation

To-do

• Add support to sending to a remote server
• Write down landing page
• Try to replace FFMPEG with something else?
• Deal with .webp (ffmpegwasm doesn't seem to like those)

Attributions

• FFMpeg.wasm: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm (fork used at https://github.com/brunoluiz/ffmpeg.wasm)
• FFMpeg.wasm-core https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm-core (fork used at https://github.com/brunoluiz/ffmpeg.wasm-core)
• FFMpeg: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg

gifsane-extension's Issues

HELP NEEDED - Not able to run it in local system

I am not able to run the extension in my local system. The extension is loaded but while converting GIF to video it is neither giving an error nor loading anything else and the loader is displayed

The following are the configurations:
Browser: Chrome 109.0.5414.75
Machine: Windows 10

Steps:

1. npm install
2. Open the dev menu and load the extension