4chan, 9gag, etc. already do this for years with great success.
4chan is barely usable on iOS because none of the videos are supported by Safari
Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
181–190 of 242 posts
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#182Can you embed video in email and have it play by default? Can you drag and drop videos onto your desktop to save? Can you upload videos anywhere that accepts an image? Can you loop and make sure it always plays on a webpage? If no, I'm not using video. No one gives a crap about your technical specs. Videos suck as a user interface.
Gifs suck as a user interface. It’s not just the huge file size, they also - Must load entirely before playing (whereas video formats can load as they play) - Don’t show any progress/buffering icon while they load, so it just looks like the page has frozen - Lack the ability to skip/scrub through the video (if I miss a part, now I have to wait the entire thing to loop) - Don’t have audio Actually, these aren’t really…
> Actually, these aren’t really issues for short gifs (Anybody doing the latter is the problem, not really the format’s fault it’s being used improperly. Any GIF with more than XX frames (for me that’s up to around 100 depending on content, but everyone is free to make their own decision) should be a video. GIF is meant to be for short animations, not for showing videos.
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
webp comes in lossy and lossless flavor. unless you want to degrade the gifs you would have to pick lossless and in that case it's not a clear win over apng even if we ignore the compatibility question.
A lossy 24-bit color webp image (which is encoded with VP8's intra-frame compression) is likely to look better than a 8-bit color palette lossless gif.
GP is talking about APNG not GIF. APNG has 24bit with alpha transparency.
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't using webm require sigining away their right to ever sue Google for patent infringement?
No. Originally, the webm license required that you couldn’t sue google for patents related to webm. They switched to BSD in 2013. Meanwhile, there have been numerous patent suits against google from other big companies around VP8, VP9, and webm. Google isn’t the bad guy in this story.
Thanks I didn't know about those developments!
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#185I 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.
The irony is a modern gif filetype would be even better. Something that retained the advantages of gifs, but allowed for better compression.
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#186I 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…
I'd rather take inconvenience instead of insane worldwide bandwidth waste. Whenever I used to see my own gifs stats on imgur I was quite sad.
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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.
JΦEG
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#188Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use a chrome-based browser, but because it's missing some component, probably due to stupid DRM crap, most videos on most sites don't play for me. However, some of them do work. I don't feel like I'm missing much. But GIFs are certainly way more usable than video. I'm also writing web-based forum designed for backwards compatibility with older browsers, so GIFs will always be the default for me.
Chrome has insane behavior where it will only autoplay videos from web sites Google trusts. If I put a video on my own web site and domain (muted, autoplay, etc.), it won't autoplay. If I put a gif up, it will. Google claims this doesn't apply to videos with muted, but at least in my Chrome, it does. Muted-by-default makes complete sense to me. I hate it when a web site makes noise. But no autoplay (even muted) is br…
Considering the noisy ads on some websites I visit, I believe they're using some other metric.
But the metric is bad.
Re: Serve Videos Instead of GIFs
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.
Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest comm…
> Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start.
Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome.
A lot of sites override the right click menu in one way or another, but that's not the browser's fault. A standard video embed is easy to save.
> Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another.
I think that might run in to some practical limitations, both in terms of simple clipboard data limits and the fact that while an image is loaded entirely in to RAM to play a video may not be. If the user does a right-click>copy five seconds in while the video is still loading but has already started playing, what should the browser do? How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie?
Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.