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Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

dannyguo.com

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Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#111

Post by chaosbutters314 »

dguo wrote: post #100
FalconSensei wrote: post #58

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user u…

Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing. They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.

I disagree, the phone/laptop manufacturer will get blamed for bad battery drainage, not the app/website/media.

For bandwidth, I'm going to blame my ISP, Chrome, firefox, etc.

For the media (gif versus movie), I'm going to blame the website.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#112

Post by joemi »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #34
joemi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gifs (and videos that people call gifs) wouldn’t be what they are today if it weren’t for their ease of copying/saving and pasting/uploading to somewhere else, which you could similarly call an application feature. So this application issue with video (as implemented in this article) is almost certainly what will stop gifs from being replaced.

But it's being done above the format level entirely. Every browser that can decode video has a "Copy Video URL" context menu item. It's just that the websites hide it to discourage hotlinking

I don't think that's necessarily true for mobile browsers, and that's a big and important-to-gif-perpetuation demographic.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#113

Post by chrismorgan »

ngoel36 wrote: post #89

I use GIFs because I want videos that act like images, not videos. GIFs I can copy & paste, and I know that they'll infinitely loop without ever showing a play/pause button. Yes, videos are smaller, but I'm unfortunately stuck with GIFs until videos work well in Google Slides and iMessage (which also means I'm also stuck with Google Slides presentations always on the verge of crashing...)

Meanwhile, I really wish I could instruct my browser to treat GIFs as videos, and load only the first frame and show controls if I wish to actually play it. Because >99% of GIF usage that I encounter is abuse of the format.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#114

Post by DangitBobby »

nikanj wrote: post #75
m463 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly. gif is a choice about the limitations of what can happen. A gif will play and repeat with NO SOUND POSSIBLE.

Imagine a browser prompt for ”This site would like to play audio” alá ”This site would like to send you notifications” Too bad that would break Youtube, so Chrome will never deliver it

Firefox mutes audio from videos by default. YouTube also functions perfectly in Firefox.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#115

Post by dguo »

chaosbutters314 wrote: post #111
dguo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing. They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.

I disagree, the phone/laptop manufacturer will get blamed for bad battery drainage, not the app/website/media. For bandwidth, I'm going to blame my ISP, Chrome, firefox, etc. For the media (gif versus movie), I'm going to blame the website.

As a website operator, I feel a personal responsibility to consider how my choices affect those things, even if my users might incorrectly blame others instead of me.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#116

Post by saghm »

franciscop wrote: post #104
saghm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood that argument; why would an acronym need to preserve the exact sounds of the letters in the original words? I don't think it's very uncommon for them not to. "UNICEF" is not pronounced "yoo-ni-chef", "POTUS" is not pronounced "po-thuss", "OSHA" is not pronounced "oss-huh", etc.

As a Spaniard, that's exactly how I would pronounce those acronyms. Time to learn a bit more about English :) Funnily enough, in Spanish "gi" is pronounced "ji" as in "Girar" (pronounced Jirar), while "gui" is pronounced like "gi" and "güi" is pronounced "gu-i". But "GIF" in Spanish is still pronounced with a soft "g", contradicting the general rule. Edit: wait Google Translate says those are pronounced that way? htt…

I've always heard the acronyms I listed as "yoo-nih-sef", "po-tuss", and "oash-a" (the first syllable like "ocean"). It would be genuinely surprising to me to find out that those were not the standard pronunciations, but I guess it's possible that I've been living in a bubble my whole life!

From the limited Spanish experience I have (a few years in middle school and high school), I was aware of the subtleties of how "g" is pronounced with relation to the following vowel, but I didn't know about how "GIF" was pronounced! It fits what I remember about loan words though; I think we had the word "hockey" as a vocab word once during a unit where we had all sports words, and we were taught that it was pronounced the same way as in English, which stuck out to me given that "ho" at the beginning of a word in Spanish would usually not have an "h" sound like in English. Of course, "ck" is basically never found in real Spanish words either; from what I recall, "k" isn't really used much at all besides in loan words!

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#117

Post by antigirl »

egfx wrote: post #60

Hold the mic drop. Those that claim videos are superior over GIF's will never understand. The only benefit that a video tag has over a gif is a smaller file size. Animation's and meme's, cinimigraphics and simulations are more than simply video. How about for all other animated graphics? And file size is increasingly becoming less and less of a factor at all. (disclosure: I built https://gif.com.ai )

The image quality of that mic drop is amazing. I’ve only ever seen that in a compressed gif. Reminds me of when I first seen a retina screen

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#118

Post by ebg13 »

WalterBright wrote: post #95
jedberg wrote: post #85

Not sure why he put this at the end: > One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That settles the never-ending debate for me. Now all he's done is make 1/2 of the population immediately discount everything else he said, regardless of its merit.

>> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".

> That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".

Exactly like the well known Joint Potatographic Experts Group, yeah? I guess it's time to start saying JayFeg.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#119

Post by chrismorgan »

drenvuk wrote: post #65

One important thing that was not mentioned in the article: gifs automatically play and are not easily stopped. Videos have more knobs on the client side to tweak whether it plays or not. If I use a gif, I know with great certainty that unless all images on the client are blocked they are going to see my animated content. There are tons of extensions and browser features out there that attempt to stop that feature fro…

1. Users have bandwidth limits. (And videos are big.)

2. Users hate constant motion on the page. (And videos have constant motion.)

3. So users stop videos from playing automatically.

4. Publishers want the video to play, so they stop using a proper video format, and use the GIF format, which produces even bigger files, and prevents users from stopping the motion.

Something’s horribly broken here. I really want browsers to let me treat GIFs as videos and block autoplay.

Typical usage of GIFs is flatly obnoxious.

Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs

#120

Post by mkl »

WalterBright wrote: post #95
jedberg wrote: post #85

Not sure why he put this at the end: > One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That settles the never-ending debate for me. Now all he's done is make 1/2 of the population immediately discount everything else he said, regardless of its merit.

>> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".

I say "Giraffe-ics Interchange Format" when I explain it that way. Plus the only English words in common usage that start with "gif" have a hard G.
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