Bit off-topic, but related:

I recently completed a trip to Budapest; both me and my friend were having cameras, and while she, as usual, made hundreds of photos I decided to try something different - I shoot 2 - 5 second videos instead. It's interesting how it can capture the atmosphere of the place qualitatively better than a plain photo would.

One thing you quickly realize is that filming tourist attractions isn't all that fun, as they're mostly stationary[0]. It's much better to refocus on filming the mundane, everyday life of the city - it's something you can capture much better with a movie and sound than with still images. Rewatching the videos make you actually feel back at the place.

Anyway, I was looking for a way to present those movies as a kind of animated photos; now reverse-engineering this website might give me some helpful hints (especially RE libraries used) :).

[0] - except fountains. Fountains feel so much more impressive on short videos than on photos.

A friend showed me the HTC One recently. Apparently the camera shoots those mini-videos by default, and you can then pick a still from there.

You can also stitch multiple shots into a single one: http://blog.htc.com/2013/05/your-sequence-shots-with-htc-zoe...

Wow, that's amazing and a superb idea. I always feel like the biggest weakness of cell phone cameras is that its hard to control exactly when the photo happens. With videos (from which you can pick a still) this would be way less of an issue.

Do you know if the HTC One Google Edition does this, or only regular HTC One?

According to an HTC rep I spoke to last month, It's part of the HTC camera app which isn't in stock Android.

I don't think it captures audio, though.

It does.

I think shorter videos are going to become a lot more popular soon. Gif 'videos' have gotten more popular recently (especially on tumblr) and things like vine's 6 second video clips are on the rise. Mobile speeds have caught up where its now possible to download/view videos and also upload a short 6 second video

That's sort of the idea behind Vine, no? I actually have never seen a Vine, but that's what I've heard.

Agreed. I personally find very short high quality video with no sound to be more pleasurable to view than short videos with sound. The first few times I used Vine I had my phone on vibrate and thought it was so smart of them to not include sound. Of course Having sound is nice sometimes but when you're browsing a bunch of short videos I think the sound kind of ruins it. Not to mention it's harder to produce a quality 6 second video if you need to account for what the viewers are going to be hearing too.

I totally agree. They're like advanced gifs. They really capture the atmosphere.

It's strange to think that within a decade we will probably have electronics to a point where we'll read moving-picture stories like this on paper-like devices -- straight out of Harry Potter.

Here is a 6min video of the Vietnam reunification express, taken outside Quy Nhon right after Lunar New Year. The slow rhythm. The lush rice paddies. Old houses with people cooking and children playing. Simply magical!

Are you being snarky? They were randomly greyed out and then just black for me.

I guess you did not notice the animated GIFs? Edit: or may be those are videos?

Video - it appears to be the simpleVideo library, located at https://github.com/markupboy/simpleVideo .