No it's not.
Maybe some specific content should be released as AV1, but most existing can stay as GIF (it just works)
It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
181–190 of 327 posts
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
No "major" impact to the CPU. As insignificant as displaying however many frames exist in the gif as still frame jpegs at the same time.
That's still not accurate. Load up 20-30 gifs on a page and I can pretty much guarantee you'll see your browser saturate a core.
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Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
GIF lets you control the loop count and playback speed. It's baked in when authored and is useful. You can simply save the file and expect it to work everywhere - dead simple. The Internet has voted in favor of looping, "GIF-like" moving images. Platforms try to emulate this with proprietary video players. Some have sound (wanted or not), some of the video players prohibit copying, and none of the files work as simpl…
> You can simply save the file and expect it to work everywhere I don't quite follow. This is because the gif is decoded and played. No different than a video. You don't need a proprietary player to loop a video, you just go back to the start of the video. For streaming, this is only problematic for large videos that can't be cached, but the same applies to large gifs. Browsers can loop video, it's just a right-click…
Video isn't superior for sharable, loopable images.
Try downloading a video from a popular social network. Can you easily do it without inspecting the source? If it's a two second clip, does it loop on your system? Or does the video player exit / end the stream?
This is absolutely a problem that GIF doesn't have.
> You don't need a proprietary player to loop a video
> You can save any video file just like a gif.
Except social networks force you to use a locked down or DRM'd player. You can get chunks of the video sometimes. Your non-tech friends are out of luck.
> you just go back to the start of the video
"just". Yeah, how many players support that out of the box? Yours might, but there are many more that do not.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#184Animated PNG seems to be the least-bad option that covers every key GIF feature, and most importantly will be supported by every major browser once Edge-Chromium ships: https://www.caniuse.com/#feat=apng
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
GIFs, in pre-AV1 terms, are simply a video with 100% lossless I-frames and autoloop enabled. You can express the “lossless frames” aspect of GIFs today in existing video ways supported by MJPEG, H.264, H.265, or AV1 today. AV1 image sequences are meant for sharing an album of stills, and are not a convenient shortcut for this. Feeding a sequence of frames into `aomenc --lossless=1` should, assuming everything else is…
Would looping not make more sense at a container level, not a codec level?
Far more sense, but containers are a disaster zone in video. Is it av1 in webm, mp4,fragmented mp4/cmaf, or ts? Where does the flag go in each?
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#186Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looping is up to the video player, not the format or container. What "video formats" have looping as metadata? Gifs only have a loop flag so static images can be displayed instead of looped indefinitely as video.
Here’s another completely different use case (I came across this while googling unsuccessfully for a way to make videos loop): You’re setting up a booth at a convention. You want to have a video playing on a TV. It should play forever in a loop. Apparently, with any normal “smart” TV, that’s very hard to do! You can put a video file on an SD card or something, but you probably can’t persuade the built-in video player…
What you describe is a software limitation in the TV's video player if it doesn't have an option to loop. Right now, I can open up a video in Firefox, say a VP8 WebM, and there's a right-click option to loop it. Every noteworthy media player (VLC, MPV, etc) supports looping. Websites can tag video to loop. Likewise, you're able to loop a gif even if it doesn't have a loop flag - the loop flag doesn't need to exist, it can be external to the format be it GIF or video.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
A behavior being unchanged for 30 years is hardly user hostile. It's reliable and trustworthy. Like a good tool should be.
Any application that doesn't allow me to stop something from being annoying, will be stopped from being annoying by being uninstalled. If browsers made it such that I couldn't not stop .gif animations (or playing video, or...), I would trash that browser. Bluntly, you do not get to control my computer.
The point is that they are more images than videos. They have no possible way to contain sounds so the annoyingness is limited to having unwanted images in your browser. You can tell your browser to block a particular still image. You can do the same thing to block a GIF. You don't need a pause/play feature on a 2-5 second sequence.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#189I think it really comes down to use case.
If your intent is to display content that is originally video, then you should use the best and most supported video format.
If your intent is to display some effect through animation, a gif isnt a bad thing.
For example, the ajax loader that we are all familiar with? The size difference is minor. The gif is 16k, an mp4 is 11k. HOWEVER, with the video I have worry about the browser playing it, looping it, and does it handle transparency? (i dunno)
If I wanted one of those full page & full motion backgrounds, it would definitely be a video. The first time I saw a page like that load, load really fast, and be high quality video, I was amazed (leave aside aesthetics)
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#190Worse is better.