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It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

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Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#61

Post by izzydata »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #56
izzydata wrote: post #33

The 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…

Animated gifs are compressed, and do require decoding. Hell, so do non-animated gifs. Since animation was added in the '90s, GIF is basically just a really inefficient (but extremely well-supported) video format. I agree that there won't be wide adoption of AV1s until it can transparently be interacted with just like gifs are now.

That is true. I suppose even jpegs are compressed and require decoding. I'm pretty sure it is orders of magnitude quicker than video decoding though. I can have 500 gifs playing at once just fine, but if I had 500 equivalently sized webm h264 videos playing my computer would have a stroke.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#62

Post by masklinn »

izzydata wrote: post #55
masklinn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 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. The saving bit is the only part which doesn't work right with videos…

I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused. This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything.

> I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused.

Your opinions are just that, and usually overridable by the client. The client could even strip your media entirely.

And gifs are pausable (used to be ESC though apparently you now need extensions).

> This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything.

I've got bad news for you: once it reaches the client you're not in control anymore, you can only suggest behaviour.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#63

Post by masklinn »

izzydata wrote: post #61
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animated gifs are compressed, and do require decoding. Hell, so do non-animated gifs. Since animation was added in the '90s, GIF is basically just a really inefficient (but extremely well-supported) video format. I agree that there won't be wide adoption of AV1s until it can transparently be interacted with just like gifs are now.

That is true. I suppose even jpegs are compressed and require decoding. I'm pretty sure it is orders of magnitude quicker than video decoding though. I can have 500 gifs playing at once just fine, but if I had 500 equivalently sized webm h264 videos playing my computer would have a stroke.

GIFs are quite expensive to decode, it's all in software and while the encoding is fairly simple the amount of data is huge (especially for high-quality gif in which each frame will be present in full). Gif playback is commonly CPU-bound on the more complex examples.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#64

Post by dwheeler »

simlevesque wrote: post #2

The article claims that AV1 works since FF 65 but the examples do not work on FF 66.

Confirm, doesn't work for me on FF on Windows.

And this is a challenge for a "new" format: if AV1 works on 90% of systems, and GIF works on 100%, then in many cases GIF is the clearly correct solution. Why would I throw away 10% of my money? Why would I ignore 10% of my customers? In many businesses, just a few customer calls because of this could seriously hurt profitability.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#65

Post by PhasmaFelis »

silversconfused wrote: post #7

The 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.

Aside from the size issue, GIF only support 256 colors per frame, so photos and real-life videos almost always have visible dithering artifacts.

It's a terribly shitty format, but remains popular because it has universal support and so works with no fuss. We need to get the same amount of support for a better format.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#67

Post by numlock86 »

izzydata wrote: post #33

The 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…

> It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU.

I remember this myth, saying that the first moon landing required as much computing power (command central, ship etc.) as rendering a GIF. No mention about the resolution, frame speed and so on, though. Hence I think it's a myth. On the other hand you could probably tune those parameters enough to actually make it a true statement ...

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#68

Post by souprock »

izzydata wrote: post #55
masklinn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 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. The saving bit is the only part which doesn't work right with videos…

I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused. This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything.

I don't see why we can't use the IMG tag for video and the VIDEO tag for images. They should be unified, with all the same media formats supported.

IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls.

VIDEO would be the opposite. For something like a plain JPG or PNG file, it just shows the one frame. Animated GIF files would of course benefit from the controls.

The same should go for unification of the VIDEO and AUDIO tags. Play an audio file as video, and you get a black screen with sound. Play a video file as audio, and you just hear the sound.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#69

Post by Causality1 »

izzydata wrote: post #33

The 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…

Yep. You can include them in any forum or comment post that supports [ img ] tags. That's one reason why it's so infuriating that Google Image search now returns videos along with images because video-gif sites like Giphy look just like actual gifs in the results but you can't embed them.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#70

Post by sp332 »

dwheeler wrote: post #64
simlevesque wrote: post #2

The article claims that AV1 works since FF 65 but the examples do not work on FF 66.

Confirm, doesn't work for me on FF on Windows. And this is a challenge for a "new" format: if AV1 works on 90% of systems, and GIF works on 100%, then in many cases GIF is the clearly correct solution. Why would I throw away 10% of my money? Why would I ignore 10% of my customers? In many businesses, just a few customer calls because of this could seriously hurt profitability.

The article shows how to make a fallback that serves GIF in cases where AV1 is not supported. That saves you 90% of your bandwidth for 90% of your image loads.
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