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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

#321

Post by asutekku »

clouddrover wrote: post #319
asutekku wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass adoption doesn’t want to use addons or go in to the developer tools. That’s my point. I know how to do it but even for me it is not intuitive.

Your point doesn't address the fact that you can have the same right-click problems with GIFs as with video files. The file type doesn't matter, the page structure does. The great mass of people don't care about saving media assets from a page. There will never be mass adoption of this, no matter how easy it is.

They do though. For example love to share memes to each other and with phone it’s as simple as pressing the image for a long time. Video formats do need the same kind of actions to compete with the ease of use of gifs.

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

#322

Post by clouddrover »

asutekku wrote: post #321
clouddrover wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point doesn't address the fact that you can have the same right-click problems with GIFs as with video files. The file type doesn't matter, the page structure does. The great mass of people don't care about saving media assets from a page. There will never be mass adoption of this, no matter how easy it is.

They do though. For example love to share memes to each other and with phone it’s as simple as pressing the image for a long time. Video formats do need the same kind of actions to compete with the ease of use of gifs.

They don't though. You're in a bubble of a minority use case.

Video formats don't need to compete with GIFs. That competition is already over. GIF files are too big to be practical at scale. Video won the file size war a long time ago, which is precisely why Twitter "GIFs" are videos.

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

#323

Post by aw3c2 »

the8472 wrote: post #305
aw3c2 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try downloading a video from a popular social network. That's the site's decision. You also cannot easily download images from Twitter if there are more than one in a tweet for example. On Instagram it is blocked all in all.

> That's the site's decision. No it isn't. UA means user agent , not corporate agent . If the user decides to persist something that is loaded on his machine then it is his choice to make.

You were lost some where in the thread above. I totally agree but that's not what we were discussing here.

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

#324

Post by chriswarbo »

afiori wrote: post #153
iainmerrick wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Just one problem I discovered recently is that no other format does looping properly. With a GIF, you can right-click and save it, and all the looping info is inside the file. The quality is crappy, but it just works. With all “proper” video formats, looping info is metadata, stored separately. You can’t even go for something slightly more modern, animated PNGs, because there are warring formats and very few too…

wasn't webp supposed to have GIF like animations? As far as i know I have never seen one in the wild, just webm. I think the problem is that GIFs are images and so displayed as such with little concept of play-control. A video format communicate that you might want to pause for example. I believe a GIF-killer will need to be considered an image as a format.

> GIFs are images and so displayed as such with little concept of play-control

> A video format communicate that you might want to pause for example.

> I believe a GIF-killer will need to be considered an image as a format.

If we consider animated GIF to be an image, then the distinction between "image" and "video" is pretty arbitrary.

I would say the distinction isn't inherent to the format either. It's inherent to the HTML tag. There's no reason we couldn't support `` or `` with the appropriate UI for each.

I actually think this is a symptom of something bigger: browsers (and most other applications) shouldn't care about media formats at all; that's a low-level concern of the OS/stdlib. The Datatypes system of AmigaOS (and later BeOS) is an example of how this could be improved.

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

#326

Post by follower »

errantspark wrote: post #60

You can pry my GIFs from my cold dead hands. Aesthetically speaking GIFs have a character that you gotta jump through a lot of hoops to approximate with another format. In addition to that they function everywhere, always autoplay, can't have annoying audio, and support transparency, these are all important features that nothing else on the 'market' can match. I'm aware that there is lossless animated WebP with trans…

> can't have annoying audio

Good news, they can now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19935900

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

#327

Post by follower »

niftich wrote: post #23

AV1 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…

> because GIFs cannot contain audio

They can (publicly) now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19935900

Of course, there's no browser support for the Application Extension, so it requires a Javascript player for now.

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