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It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

singhkays.com

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

#131
post #127
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari recently added VP8 support for WebRTC, so hopefully they also support VP9 in the future. https://webkit.org/blog/8672/on-the-road-to-webrtc-1-0-inclu...

That's for WebRTC only, though.

Yes, that's what I said, and why I hope they will expand VP* support in the future.

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

#132

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.

Author here: I've uploaded the GIFs here https://github.com/singhkays/its-time-replace-gifs-with-av1-...

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

#133
post #25

Just a parenthetical note: The article, in its ffmpeg encoding guide says, -f - Only used in the first pass. Specifies the format of the output file in the second pass i.e. MP4 in this case This is not required to be the same as the intended output format. Using `-f null -` will work just as well, as long as the encoder is epxressly set, which it is, in the commands shown.

Thank you for the explanation. I'll update the article.

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

#134

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…

> 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 think the saving part is a big deal.

There are related problems like embedding. If you upload a video to Slack, say, you can’t control whether it autoplays or loops. If you upload a GIF it just works.

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

#135
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Challenge accepted. https://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldance.htm Just did it on my 2011 MacBook Air. Pushes all four cores up... about 15%.

Try again using a gallery page on a site like giphy which is going to be more representative of the use case op was talking about. edit: such as https://giphy.com/sports/2019-stanley-cup-playoffs which seems to be entirely gifs if you view page resources in the debugger.

I don't believe these are actually gifs here. Similar to sites like imgur or twitter they convert it to something else to host for other people. Probably to keep bandwidth down. You can get to the actual gif, but you have to dig for it.

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

#136

AV1 is not enabled by default in Firefox 66 on Linux. You have to flip a switch in about:config to get it to work. media.av1.enabled For what it's worth, AV1 videos play really slowly on my machine. There's probably a reason AV1 is not enabled by default yet.

They use Dav1d in Nightly so it will be fast soon.

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

#139
post #6

Why no h265? I suspect it's similar to VP9 in quality, but h264 is pretty old at this point (nowhere near as old as GIFs of course).

I believe the big issue with h265 was the huge licensing cost to bundle the decoder in the browser.

Correct and also lackluster browser support https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc

I've added a note to the article

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