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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

#291
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> The UX for saving and sharing videos is the same as for images… Minus drag and drop, in browsers at least.

[deleted]

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

#292
post #38

It'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…

> but the AV1 files are LARGER than either the H.264 or VP9 versions in every example If the author aimed for the same quality they would be much smaller, they instead opted for the same bitrate because that would be opening the can of worms of "similar quality is subjective in the eye of the author." If you watch the samples, you can clearly see how more more AV1 gets done with [roughly] the same number of bits; H.2…

You’re right about the bitrates producing similar sizes but “blurry mess” seems like pure hyperbole, especially in the context of replacing GIFs rather than say a theater setup (or we should count AV1s difficulty playing in real-time on all but the latest hardware against it).

I was thinking of the comparison from this angle:

GIF: plays everywhere, horrible quality and giant file sizes, high CPU usage.

H.264: plays everywhere, good quality and file sizes, almost universal hardware acceleration even on cheap devices

VP9: plays many places, competitive size with H.264, hardware acceleration is common but entire popular platforms lack support

AV1: limited support, great file sizes, hardware support has barely started shipping.

If the goal is to replace GIFs I would weight compatibility and ease of playback much greater than bumping the file size savings from 95% to 97%.

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

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More color depth is sort of useful for heavily compressed video. Transparency very rarely matters in that use case.

“Sort of useful”?? 8-bit versus 24-bit color is like night and day! Transparency for video is kind of a niche thing, sure, but when you need it you really need it. A good example would be compositing green-screen footage. (Keying transparency on a specific color is exactly the kind of hack GIF uses, whereas PNG does it properly, with a separate alpha channel.) Omitting obvious stuff like an alpha channel because you…

For a super compressed video there's really not that much difference. And that's almost all videos as gifs. You don't want it to be 100MB.

And I didn't say transparency isn't needed by "anyone". I said it's very rare for video-ish content.

Apng is better than gif. But its advantages really shine in realms other than video content. They're both pretty bad at video content, even despite looping properly.

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but your comment has no place here. I was discussing a dead soul with reverence and respect. That is not the time to jump in with "oh but actually he was terrible". That is incredibly rude and poor taste and disrespectful to the dead. Terry Davis suffered greatly from mental illness, specifically schizophrenia. He suffered from confusion. It's quite disgusting that you try to cite some of the ridiculous th…

Right after someone dies, there may be people mourning them, so it's terribly disrespectful to criticize the dead person. That concern about disrespect is largely about respecting the mourning process. But, after some time has passed, we should be able to discuss and evaluate a person's impact (good and bad). Otherwise history would be impossible to write. It's been eight months. I think it's okay to acknowledge the…

Oh ok cool, I didn't realize Mother Nature gave you the responsibility of deciding when it was OK to disrespect a dead person with an irrelevant, unnecessary comment meant only to disparage, especially when that person was extremely mentally ill.

So just to make sure I have it right, 8 months is the cutoff point? Then I'm allowed to talk shit about the deceased mentally ill every time their name comes up?

Imagine you created a legacy. But you were schizophrenic and a little kooky. And 8 months after you died, every time someone ever brought up your name again, the conversation was completely derailed by someone who wanted attention and got it by bringing up stupid kooky shit you said. That's the kind of hot garbage you are proposing. I refuse to disrespect the dead in that manner.

> Grandparent comment didn't say Davis was terrible, as you claim; the words were "He said some terrible stuff".

That's like when I tell my relatives they're saying racist things instead of directly calling them racist. It's a way to hide behind your words. It's an emergency hatch.

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

#295
post #53
post #38

It'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…

Do you remember that time [1] when GIFs had a patented algorithm, and suddenly the the patent holder decided to enforce it more strictly? This is how GIFs were massively replaced with PNGs, except for the animated. PNG support sucked at the time, too (see e.g. IE6). By now it's far superior to GIF in every way. I think there is a bit of a parallel here. H.264 and WebM may be brilliant codecs from the engineering POV,…

I do remember that period well but there’s an interesting wrinkle: almost everyone with a computer already has a licensed implementation from their device/OS vendor. This is a consideration for anyone encoding video for the web who isn’t already producing H.264 and doesn’t have access to a licensed encoder but that can’t be a very large group of people – and even if it was larger, given the history of things like GIFv I’d be very surprised if the license costs outweighed the huge savings in bandwidth.

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

#296
post #126

At 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…

All of the clips in this article have 'Save Video As...' options for me... ?

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

#297
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a member of the Alliance for Open Media, the group behind AV1: https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ . I'd suspect apple will roll out support at some point.

Apple is also a member of MPEG LA, and has refused to adopted VP9. With AV1 perhaps they changed their tune and/or had no choice industry wise.

VP9 is a Google project which competed with the MPEG-developed H.265. It’s not surprising that Apple implemented the format they contributed to and then jumped to the next generation format rather than spending time on an older format which never saw significant adoption.

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right after someone dies, there may be people mourning them, so it's terribly disrespectful to criticize the dead person. That concern about disrespect is largely about respecting the mourning process. But, after some time has passed, we should be able to discuss and evaluate a person's impact (good and bad). Otherwise history would be impossible to write. It's been eight months. I think it's okay to acknowledge the…

Oh ok cool, I didn't realize Mother Nature gave you the responsibility of deciding when it was OK to disrespect a dead person with an irrelevant, unnecessary comment meant only to disparage, especially when that person was extremely mentally ill. So just to make sure I have it right, 8 months is the cutoff point? Then I'm allowed to talk shit about the deceased mentally ill every time their name comes up? Imagine you…

You don't get to police other people's opinions. Close the tab if you are so offended.

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

#299
post #243

Wake me up when the AVI encoder's performance can be measured by Frames Per Second. Currently, it should better be counted by Frames Per Day. Decoder is also slow. We need a high end desktop computer for real-time decoding of AV1 video. There is no phone/tablet that can afford such performance.

> Wake me up when the AVI encoder's performance can be measured by Frames Per Second.

Okay, I will. Hrm. Intel's AV1 encoder is getting 24 frames per second:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SVT-AV1-...

WAKE UP!

> There is no phone/tablet that can afford such performance.

Isn't there? I wonder how well the top end iPhones are decoding AV1:

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/issues/15

Decoding at over 100 frames per second multithreaded two weeks ago. Not bad.

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

#300
post #150

The VP9 and AV1 aren't loading in my browser, (latest Safari on Mojave 10.14.4). I understand pushing for progress, but with this table, I'm not sure "it's time" just yet. https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1

Maybe this would incentive Apple into supporting these formats. For vp9, it seems to me there isn't any good excuse for not supporting it.

> For vp9, it seems to me there isn't any good excuse for not supporting it.

Exporting video formats is expensive: there's a lot of optimization work to have a high-quality battery-friendly implementation, decode hardware has to be licensed & updated, and they have to do security hardening and support every time they add a new format. If they're already working on AV1, why double the cost to add support for an older format which is almost never used as the only option?

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