While investigating if I could actually use this—animated PNG, I found this website and it convinced me it is the new direction I should take: http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp.html
It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
201–210 of 327 posts
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#202At this point, killing GIF is a UX problem, not a format problem. I've talked about this before [0], but the big problem for me is that video is just difficult as hell. Compared to a GIF, it is just that much harder to save a video on a phone, and then upload it the same way as an image. Try to save a "GIF" from Twitter or from GIPHY - it's a /huge/ pain. Whatever the GIF killer is will need to pass the right click t…
Yes. Add this to the list of problems you can't believe we still have to put up with in 2019.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#203At this point, killing GIF is a UX problem, not a format problem. I've talked about this before [0], but the big problem for me is that video is just difficult as hell. Compared to a GIF, it is just that much harder to save a video on a phone, and then upload it the same way as an image. Try to save a "GIF" from Twitter or from GIPHY - it's a /huge/ pain. Whatever the GIF killer is will need to pass the right click t…
The UX for saving and sharing videos is the same as for images, including right click to save. You and I don't get that UX, though, because Twitter, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and most websites write code to fight off-site sharing and deploy it on their videos but not their images. They skip images presumably because it's easier to bypass there and because everybody knows you're user-hostile when you break image UX, whereas when you break video UX even HN users blame the browser or operating system.
So it's worse than a UX problem, it's a social problem.
Maybe as-easy-as-screenshots screen recording would go a long way toward solving it, but we've been beat to it: big tech has bent kernels, operating systems, browsers, and even most nations around the world into collaborating to refuse to take moving screenshots of video files, under the label of DRM.
So maybe the root of it all is just timing. Images were added to the web when the web was just a tool, so everybody knew what they were before big tech could set an expectations like that moving an image from memory to disk isn't a normal feature, or that wanting to is controversial, or that doing it might be illegal. Video, though, came at a time when there were big players that knew the stakes and were ready.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#204AV1 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
I believe that this is the case on Safari, don't know about any other browsers though
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#205You can blame both Google and Mozilla for ruining the chance to replace GIFs with APNG and WebP respectively. People were waiting the support of those for years in Chrome/Firefox, but their stubbornness already forced some image hosting sites to use video formats like WebM. At this point I am not sure WebP or APNG would become popular. But using proper image format for animation is a better solution , I think.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#206Earlier 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.
You used to be able to press the escape button to stop GIFs on the page. It's not unchanged for 30 years.
Browsers have changed, a lot, in sad and unfortunate ways like you mention here, but the gif format is pretty stable.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing about allowing play/pause that prevents videos from behaving exactly like gifs. I've seen browsers with play/pause options for gifs, even.
The stop button used to stop all gifs on a page in firefox and internet explorer. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature though, since the stop button was generally not available when page load finished.
(Maybe I remembered wrong, someone else mentioned here that it was ESC, not stop)
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
And for bonus disaster problems:
Should AGIF continue to autoplay when in more efficient other formats it may not?
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's fine, but it's lossless so it's not good for most video use cases.
So is animated gif, though.
What I'm saying is, in uses akin to this article, apng is not a meaningful upgrade over gif.
It's a huge upgrade for certain kinds of content, especially animated icons with aliased edges. But that narrowness means there's only a moderately small push toward adoption.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, i…
The point is that if I send you a gif, you currently don't need to tell whatever program you opened it in that it's meant to loop. When I send you a gif, I expect it to be looped on your end. It's part of the gif package that we've come to love.
Of course the loop flag doesn't strictly need to exist, but if someone has to perform an extra step to do what gifs were already doing, then no one will use it as a replacement.