Old school baby! In Mantle's day they'd frisk outgoing scribes for illustrations.

I hate animated GIFs, so I'm going to root for Goliath on this one.

Yeah, these things annoy the hell out of me.

I don't like them either (the first time while they're loading they're jumpy as hell and besides, no sound), but it's the fact that the other sports leagues don't care if you upload clips of old games on YouTube. If you upload an MLB broadcast, it might last 5 minutes before it gets pulled for a copyright violation. Now they're getting so aggressive, that people hosting ten-second animated gifs will get cease and desist letters.

On a related note,Brooks Baseball no longer has live Pitch F/x, for much the same reason.

Taking away live Pitch F/X from Brooks is a ####### ####### move. I used that site during games all the time. They have the best Pitch F/X data and graphs around. ####### stupid that MLB made them stop giving info during games.

I'm not going to go use gameday with its velocities rounded to the nearest MPH and completely vague plotting of pitch locations. It's utterly useless compared to what Brooks provided.

You guys could've told me that you didn't like 'em ya know---hehe

On the other hand, we have to give MLB credit for producing so much incredible digital content. At Bat is pretty much the best thing ever. Last night I was watching the west coast games in bed on my Roku. What other league compares? I'm willing to cut them some slack.

How much money does MLB think they're going to make from people who only went to the mlb.com media site to see a squirrel on the field? These people are not going to sign up for MLB.TV or buy a $35 hat. On the other hand, sharing baseball with the very casual internet traveler seems like a way to avoid the marginalization that's occurring as baseball moves from National Pasttime to Big Four to Major Sport. I do not understand the logic here, but it's not a new problem.

Time for the dumb question of the day: what's an animated GIF?

The logic is simple-it's called being penny wise and pound foolish.

It's a case of making a cash grab now at the expense of future fans (With accompanying dollars)later.

Playing devils advocate here...

If MLBAM is going to get the teams and local broadcasts to give up their blackout rights for online viewing, they are going to need an established record of actively protecting copyrights on that media.

Time for the dumb question of the day: what's an animated GIF?

There's one here.

Even Lucas left/still allows Youtube clips of the Star Wars lightsaber battles. Some from as old as 2008 are still up. I'd assume it's because he knows they can only increase interest in his product.

George Lucas doesn't (unless I blinked and missed it) have his own Internet presence which competes directly for views with user-generated lightsaber clips.

If you're BAM and you've paid a pretty penny for the exclusive rights to these things, why would you not go after your "competition"?

Good luck with that. The files can be hosted freely on any host. This isn't like video were 90% of the market is Youtube and responsive to copyright claims.

Assuming a "48-hour window" means that they's like people to wait 48 hours before posting GIFs, I don't hate that request. If you still think a GIF is hilarious 48 hours later, it's more likely to be worth posting.

Time for the dumb question of the day: what's an animated GIF?

An evil holdover from the mid-'90s Internet that unfortunately didn't die like web contemporaries like the BLINK and MARQUEE tags (and other horrors too many to mention).

Eh, disagree. Plenty of gifs are fun, when you aren't so old and grumpy.

In a baseball context, I think animated gifts have their place. They're great for showing particular pitches. They're short, and I don't need sound to see a pitch. I don't know that I buy the 48 hour rule, but it's also not totally onerous.

What weird corner of the internet did I wander into that people don't enjoy GIFs? You guys are a weird bunch.

What weird corner of the internet did I wander into that people don't enjoy GIFs? You guys are a weird bunch.

yup, if you don't like gifs, upgrade your computer, or something.

What weird corner of the internet did I wander into that people don't enjoy GIFs? You guys are a weird bunch.

I don't want animated GIFs totally banned from the internet, but with very rare exceptions, anyone who puts more than one animated GIF on a web page should have their computers taken away.

GIFs, on the BTF scrapheap to join cupcakes, certain kinds of mayo, the Defender, Spidey bases...

How can anyone hate GIFs when they provide such highlights as this?

On the other hand, we have to give MLB credit for producing so much incredible digital content. At Bat is pretty much the best thing ever. Last night I was watching the west coast games in bed on my Roku. What other league compares? I'm willing to cut them some slack.

This is very true. The NFL is in the stone age regarding digital and has a complete blackout on coaches tapes and sharing advanced data. I think the fact is, MLB has figured out how to monetize digital better than every other league, so they have something to protect and lose by allowing a free for all. The NFL and NBA, not so much. Although I agree with the premise MLB could stand to take their pissy-ness down a notch.

Coaches film is available via NFL rewind.

What I find annoying about MLB highlights is not only that mlb seems to crack down on them on the internet, but they themselves provide kind of shitty highlights. I'm quite often hanging out with people who are new to baseball and curious about it, and it would be handy to go put on a 10 minute video stream of "top great plays" or something, but it seems impossible to find videos that aren't just clips of individual plays that come with commercials that are as long as the actual clip. With the NHL it's the easiest thing in the world to go on youtube and say, here are some great saves/hits/goals.

I don't want animated GIFs totally banned from the internet, but with very rare exceptions, anyone who puts more than one animated GIF on a web page should have their computers taken away.

There can only be one response to this blasphemy!

There can only be one response to this blasphemy!

WTF

Two words to show how awesome gifs are: Alison. Brie.

Love Community and loved the Community gifs tumblr for a time, but I think it reached a creepy saturation once gifs of Brie in real life started showing up on message boards.

Can't believe Ibanez! hasn't been posted yet.

There can only be one response to this blasphemy!

WTF

You glued your cats paws together? You mean ###.

Gifs are awesome. I believe images like this should be spread around.

Bruce (#9) -

The short technical explanation (I don't know enough to give the long, complete one) is that gif, like jpeg, is an acronym for a kind of computer image storage. gifs are used a lot on the internet because, compared to jpegs and the others, gifs take up a lot less computer memory, so they load and display faster on your computer. I'm not sure how they take up less memory, but often what it means is that the image isn't the best in terms of quality. I don't know what the exact technical trade-off is for gifs as opposed to other forms. Often the trade-off involves how many individual pixels are involved in each image, but there are other, trickier, things that good computer programmers can do to compress image storage.

An animated gif is as simple in concept as any other form of projecting a movie. You have a lot of gifs, shot really quickly, one after the other, from a camera. If you project them on a screen (movie or computer) quickly enough, the eye is fooled into thinking it's seeing one moving image instead of a lot of static ones. gif is generally the best form to use for computer animation because the individual static images take so little time to load. This leads to fewer dropped images and fewer times when the viewer has to wait for more images to load, so the movie appears to pause less often and run more smoothly than animation using other forms.

Animated gifs can be a pain because, even though they have the shortest load times of any animation technique, they don't load instantly. They can bog down your computer, making it respond slowly. Other forms are just worse at slowing down computers than gifs are.

That's about the limit of what I know. There are people who know a lot more. - Brock Hanke

I don't want animated GIFs totally banned from the internet, but with very rare exceptions, anyone who puts more than one animated GIF on a web page should have their computers taken away.

Somebody has never visited b3ta

That's about the limit of what I know. There are people who know a lot more. - Brock Hanke

That is a great sign off. If it weren't for the copyright infringement issues I'd use that at the end of every one of my posts (minus the name).

Assuming a "48-hour window" means that they's like people to wait 48 hours before posting GIFs, I don't hate that request. If you still think a GIF is hilarious 48 hours later, it's more likely to be worth posting.

Yeah, when I saw the headline, I feared I'd never see yankeedouche again. But it's just about highlights during the first 48 hours. No big deal.

Gifs are awesome. I believe images like this should be spread around.

The hilariousness of that should not go unacknowledged.

Often the trade-off involves how many individual pixels are involved in each image, but there are other, trickier, things that good computer programmers can do to compress image storage.

The raw amount of pixels isn't a format issue. You can use however many pixels you want in any format, be it jpg, gifs, or whatever. Gifs specifically use a Lempel–Ziv–Welch compression, which is lossless. The downside to using compression, is that the computer on the other end has 'unpack' the data again to make it usable. But given the CPU speed of modern computers, for small files such as images, the cost is basically trivial.

Also, I am not sure this is 100& true any more*, but gifs typically only have 8-bit color depth (256 colors, rather than 32 bit true color. That obviously leads to a huge reduction of file size compared to other formats.

*there have always been a few workarounds to get more color depth with gifs, but they are a PITA, so not very wide spread AFAIK.

I can't believe there are all these replies and nobody has pointed out that there's a Carlos Gomez post in the mix. I didn't even realize he still lurked here, let alone posted.

Fancy Pants clearly knows a LOT more than I do about gifs. I will mention that if gifs use 8-bit depth instead of 32-bit, that represents a drop in file size to one QUARTER (8/32) of what another system would use, which would explain a lot of the value of gifs. "Lossless compression", BTW, means that the programmers are using those tricks I talked about to avoid losing pixels and ending up with a worse image than another system. The 8-bit depth would also mean that it is more important to use what are called "web-safe" colors. The basic idea of web-safe is to have colors that render correctly regardless of the browser you use on the display end. This is more important when you have less color depth because, when you get off by just a little in an 8-bit system, the viewer will see a greater variance from the intended color. You get off by one color out of the huge number involved in 32-bit, the human eye probably can't even notice. But if you get off by one color in an 8-bit system, the human eye can tell the difference. Of course, if you're streaming photos or video, you don't have any control over what colors are there.

Greg -you say that you would use, "That's about the limit of what I know. There are people who know a lot more." except for possible copyright problems. If you're serious, I hereby release that phrase from any copyright connection to me. Steal it as often as you want! If you were kidding, well, then, steal it all you want anyway! I, personally, am flattered. - Brock

Really? Gabe Kapler?

The 8-bit depth would also mean that it is more important to use what are called "web-safe" colors. The basic idea of web-safe is to have colors that render correctly regardless of the browser you use on the display end.

Web-safe colors are not a browser issue, there a display issue. I.e. a lot of older monitors only had 256 bit capability, resulting in the same difficulties you described. I am not aware of any compatibility issues between browsers regarding color palettes.

However, even if this were true, it would actually not be a problem with the gif format. Gifs do not use pre-defined 256 colors. Each image uses a unique set of colors, which are mapped to a table which has entries in RGBA form (e.g. if 0 is black and 1 is white, it reads 0=000000; 1=FFFFFF etc.). So the color values being read from the browser from the look-up table are still actually in true color.

Survey says: ROFL Copter is teh coolest thing evar!

Marlins' new groundskeeper

alison brie is teh awesome ...

Survey says: ROFL Copter is teh coolest thing evar!

Cooler than the LOLercoaster? Cooler than the WOOT boat?