AV1 will never work on Safari, so it's dead in the water.
It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
31–40 of 327 posts
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#32AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8. Notwithstanding any issues about video codec support in browsers, GIFs will continue to have value until browser-vendors, spec-writers, and webmasters accidentally or deliberately coalesce around a sane ruleset for embedded motion picture completely devoid of audio . Today, browser-makers have c…
Perhaps audio-free videos should be allowed in tags
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#33The most important part of GIFs for me is that they behave like images in browsers. They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. You can drag and drop them from a browser to your desktop to save them. You can save an entire page and have all the image files save with it. I've never had this work for webm or other video formats.
You could even argue that GIFs not being a video with no video decoding required is a feature. It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU.
I don't care about video compression or hardware decoding or whatever until they function the same way as GIFs do.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#34GIFs are still here because people make art with it, in some form. This is how we got still GIFs around, not because we needed to transfer videos. The idea of replacing everything based on technical superiority is extremely shortsighted. We need more humanists in computing.
You can make the same art with other formats. I'm not sure exactly what your point is here.
1. One of the reasons a kinda secondary feature of GIFs (animations) became so popular is because it's so easy to generate them. 2. A big feature is that they are not lossy compressed so you can do animations of all the kinds. 3. They allow to set very slow FPS settings in a trivial way.
Animated GIFs are not really a video format, they are just a set of non-lossy compressed images shown at a timer interval. Such small details are hugely important when some media is used in a creative way.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#35AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8. Notwithstanding any issues about video codec support in browsers, GIFs will continue to have value until browser-vendors, spec-writers, and webmasters accidentally or deliberately coalesce around a sane ruleset for embedded motion picture completely devoid of audio . Today, browser-makers have c…
You're right, but I think the purpose of the article is to spread word about AV1 as a comparison with h264 and vp9 through the fun example of GIFs. Most people know that at least h264 should be used for looping movie clips if your service cares about filesize.
I believe that autoplaying videos are allowed in all browsers if no sound channel is included in the video container.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#36What ever happened to the APNG format? I remember dabbling with it years ago but seems to have never caught on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
All browsers except IE/Edge support it, so it "caught on", but I don't see it in the wild, so it hasn't caught on with web publishers.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#37AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8. Notwithstanding any issues about video codec support in browsers, GIFs will continue to have value until browser-vendors, spec-writers, and webmasters accidentally or deliberately coalesce around a sane ruleset for embedded motion picture completely devoid of audio . Today, browser-makers have c…
> AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8.
They have. The "gifs" on reddit or imgur are generally h.264, even if you upload gifs they'll get converted to video files.
TFA's just saying those should be switched to AV1, or an AV1 source should be provided.
I'm not sure they're right though. h.264 will be larger and of lower quality especially at low bitrates, but clients can offload the decoding to hardware whereas with AV1 most or all will be decoding in software.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#38It's telling that the author doesn't list all of the file sizes. The GIFs are gigantic but the AV1 files are LARGER than either the H.264 or VP9 versions in every example. If we wanted to replace GIFs you'd want to go with something closer to a comparable level of support and at this scale there's no reason to use a format with no hardware support and limited client support in general:
https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4 97.16%
https://caniuse.com/#feat=webm 86.39%
https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc 16.57%
https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1 35%
Note also that this is _any_ support at all, including the slow software implementations which boost the VP9 and AV1 numbers but have significant drawbacks if you care about quality, battery life, or the impact on other things running on the same device.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#39For whatever reason my browser is crashing when trying to read this article, so I guess I'll keep my GIFs.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#40The code shows the first three video formats being available and prioritized before gif, but the sample videos do not include gifs. It'd be nice to see the quality difference between the format that is being discouraged and the format being encouraged. Personally, I love gifs. They work with no fuss.
I like GIFs too, they do indeed work well on all platforms. But I agree with OP, in that we should be switching over to more sustainable standards. Think about the energy savings we could get across the web if even 25% of GIFs were converted to newer and more efficient formats.
I have no problem being fed the fad of the month codec, as long as a reliable fallback is available.