WebM support on 4chan

WebM is clearly a far inferior experience compared to gif on firefox:

- at the start there is a stupid "fade in" effect.

- the loading animation does sometimes not disappear even though the video has fully loaded.

- the loading animation is generally annoying. Gifs just stop when bufffering and continue as soon as there is new data.

- a useless control bar shows at the bottom on hovering.

- Unlike gifs the video does not stop when you scroll beyond it which causes a huge amount of processor load.

WebP/M and H.264 are lossy formats, so any comparison citing one ultimate filesize for them is nonsensical.

I'd expect them to beat PNG with acceptable quality, since PNG's compression (gzip with some prefilters to make image data more gzippable) is the work of someone either limited by patents or not informed enough to make their own entropy coder.

Also try 'ffv1' in ffmpeg; it's lossless and will win every time.

Some browsers keep playing the video after you scroll past. Being able to stop it using the controls is valuable.

Yeah, expanding WebMs inline is probably not the smartest idea. Someone made a video of them browsing a WebM thread in Firefox with the task manager, and Firefox swiftly growing in the gigabytes of memory usage until it ran out of address space (Firefox is still 32-bit only on Windows) and crashed. They will probably need to change the inline extension to automatically close videos after some limit has been reached.

Firefox's implementation of gifs isn't exactly sunshine and roses either. It appears to keep animating gifs in the background, even if they are in separate, not selected tabs. For one, you can see the tab icon animating pointlessly. More importantly, this uses up a surprising amount of CPU. All the time I hear my laptop's fans start whirring, and see that all of my cores are pegged at 20-40% (on a Sandy Bridge i5, mind you, not some toaster). When I realize that I have some gifs open and close those tabs, it immediately drops back down to a normal 0-2% usage idle.

I'm pretty sure h264 is the superior codec in all regards except for that pesky license issue. It encodes faster and creates smaller files that look better. From (lead x264 developer and HN user) DarkShikari[1]:

"Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise. The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264. Of course, this is still significantly better than Theora, and in my tests it beats Dirac quite handily as well.

...

Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder..."

I won't pretend to know what all of those terms mean off the top of my head, but if the lead x264 developer sees absolutely no technical advantage in WebM vs. h264, that sounds pretty damning to me.

As for why x264 encodes h264 so much faster than ffmpeg or whatever encodes WebM, the simplest explanation would be that there is much greater demand for an optimized h264 encoder. WebM has some admittedly large users (Wikimedia Foundation, Youtube for browsers with no h264 support and no flash player, and now 4chan), but they're still vanishingly small in comparison to the users of h264 ("the entire video industry").

[1] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377