It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by vortico » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

silversconfused wrote: post #7

The code shows the first three video formats being available and prioritized before gif, but the sample videos do not include gifs. It'd be nice to see the quality difference between the format that is being discouraged and the format being encouraged. Personally, I love gifs. They work with no fuss.

At similar bitrates, they would be barely disinguishable visual garbage. At similar visual qualities, they'd be 10-20x filesize. It would be useful for the author to make this point by example though.

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

#22

Post by ChrisGranger » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

AV1 is not enabled by default in Firefox 66 on Linux. You have to flip a switch in about:config to get it to work.

    media.av1.enabled

For what it's worth, AV1 videos play really slowly on my machine. There's probably a reason AV1 is not enabled by default yet.

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

#23

Post by niftich » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

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 concerns about which videos to autoplay, webmasters' tools for specifying "muted" videos have been unreliable. GIFs completely sidestep that conversation, because GIFs cannot contain audio, and will always autoplay.

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

#24

Post by Wowfunhappy » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #12

tetrisgm wrote: post #3

I'd love to AV1 to become the standard, but as far as I've seen, it's just not implemented anywhere, and the spec wasn't 100% final. I was messing with ffmpeg a couple months ago, and it didn't look like a straightforward option to convert either. I'd say it's not quite time we replace GIFs with it.

It's implemented nearly everywhere (firefox, ffmpeg, edge, chrome, opera, vlc,...) and the spec is 100% final. Problem is that (and now the everywhere gets weak) android didn't implement it yet (afaik) and some packaged versions of the software haven't got it enabled or are just out of date. What we can get from the article thought is: why isn't gif replaced by webm/vp9 yet? Can be encoded in no time and is actually…

caniuse.com says av1 isn't supported in (all versions of) Safari, which also means it won't work on any iOS device.

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

#25

Post by _Gyan_ » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

Just a parenthetical note:

The article, in its ffmpeg encoding guide says,

  -f - Only used in the first pass. Specifies the format of the output file in the second pass i.e. MP4 in this case

This is not required to be the same as the intended output format. Using `-f null -` will work just as well, as long as the encoder is epxressly set, which it is, in the commands shown.

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

#26

Post by vortico » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

davidcollantes wrote: post #5

It seems VP9 and AV1 do not play on macOS Safari.

That is correct. Safari supports neither of these.

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

#27

Post by jjordan » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

What ever happened to the APNG format? I remember dabbling with it years ago but seems to have never caught on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

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

#28

Post by codetrotter » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

> It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs

I thought "everyone" already agreed on this. Video files are smaller and if you choose the right set of codecs for which clients have hardware acceleration then playback consumes less energy, meaning your visitors don't drain the batteries of their devices as fast.

> replacing GIFs with video has now been common for a few years

Indeed. Which kind of leaves me wondering why author seems to be introducing their article as though it wasn't.

Of course, the article does go on to argue for a specific codec. Still, to me it seems to talk in a way as if not using GIF is "controversial".

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

#29

Post by tdb7893 » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #20

GIFs are still here because people make art with it, in some form. This is how we got still GIFs around, not because we needed to transfer videos. The idea of replacing everything based on technical superiority is extremely shortsighted. We need more humanists in computing.

You can make the same art with other formats. I'm not sure exactly what your point is here.

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

#30

Post by vortico » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

simlevesque wrote: post #2

The article claims that AV1 works since FF 65 but the examples do not work on FF 66.

Set `media.av1.enabled` to true in about:config.