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The Long, Remarkable History of the GIF

247 points by pmcpinto 10y ago

danso 10y ago
That was a nice lengthy read. While the GIF format itself is a bit outdated, I hope the artform of excerpting video/animation into a silent, short-loop never goes out of style. Is it impossible to turn back GIF adoption? What if someone makes the equivalent of Steve Jobs's declaration against Flash? To me, Flash was far more vital to the very operation of web services. Then again, processing GIFs doesn't require near the same complexity or security risks as Flash did.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  I think the gifv container format will mostly kill animated gifs in a few years. It promises the silent, looped animations, maintains name recognition, but has good compression.
  - lfender6445 10y ago
    the conversation with the imgur ceo was my favorite part of this piece. for those interested: > GIFV is not actually a distinct file format, but it is an MP4 or WebM video that is presented via a HTML 5 video element or an Adobe Flash element with options set so as to make it work similarly to an animated GIF (i.e. endless loop with no video controls visible > http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/GIFV http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/GIFV
fsiefken 10y ago
In the article Battilana is quoted as saying: "Even browsers today don't have a good alternative to GIF unless you want a very sophisticated and still patent-covered video like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4." But we have WebM, works on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and on IE with components https://www.webmproject.org/ie/ https://www.webmproject.org/ie/ - is that not good enough? No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. Chrome has an add-on for it but I don't know about IE. You wonder if the image is smaller when it's a silent video or when it's a APNG, probably it's the same with animated GIF, the movie format is more efficient then the animated image format. Perhaps someone can make a proxy plugin that converts all animated gifs on the fly to webm and all gifs to png. You never have to see these GIFs again, another SaaS subscription model
- mjevans 10y ago
  It isn't. It has to work on 99.99% of things. People have to actually feel /shocked/ that it doesn't work on a platform for it to be a sufficient replacement.
  - byuu 10y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Apparently mobile Safari is the only browser that refuses to support :hover CSS menus, and even though that's maybe 0.1% of my site's traffic, it almost concerns me enough to implement some elaborate workaround. Almost. Anyone that was running a business would not be able to write off a browser as I have. Hell, I still have a Javascript hack for IE8 to support HTML5 tags. Saying, "go fetch these browser plugins to view this page" or lose IE users is an absolute non-starter, unfortunately.
    - guptaneil 10y ago
      I downvoted you and started scrolling away, but then figured it was rude to not give you an explanation, so here it goes... I downvoted you because your comment is difficult to follow. My best interpretation is that you dislike iOS Safari because it doesn't support a specific CSS feature (one that makes little sense on a touch device), but you don't care enough about iOS to find a workaround. However, you do care about IE8 (a browser that was released 7 years ago) enough for it to be a non-starter to ignore it as well. That's an interesting business decision, but to each their own. Regardless, none of your comment seems relevant to the ongoing discussion of replacing gif with webm and the difficulty of finding a universal format. tl;dr ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - cr3ative 10y ago
      How would you implement :hover on a touch screen?
      - byuu 10y ago
        The same way mobile Chrome and mobile Firefox do it: you tap the menu item and the :hover dropdown appears and stays there. Tap outside of the box to make it go away.
SquareWheel 10y ago
It's honestly something I've become quite bitter about. I find the resurgence of the gif has significantly reduced my enjoyment of browsing websites like reddit. Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. When it's appropriate I have no problem with a video. But if posting a video it should really be in its original form. Uploading to Youtube or even just using a <video> tag lets the viewer decide if they want to listen to audio, and what resolution to watch in. It's pretty rare that I'd choose to watch in no sound and at the lowest resolution possible. Not to mention the absurd amount of data gifs download. The recent trend of converting videos into gifs back into videos (websites like gfycat) make even less sense. All you're doing is damaging the quality of the video. To what end? Even articles that are posted are now scattered with gifs. Why? I guess because it's trendy. But it makes it incredibly difficult to focus on the text. The article above is a good (and likely self-aware) example, but this one from Atom also stuck out for me. http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations.html http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations... Terribly nauseating. So that's my rant. Frankly I'd welcome a browser extension to block animated gifs online and hide reddit posts than only link to them.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Firefox has Gif Block: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/
- zyxley 10y ago
  > Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. There's some black humor here in how the actual imageboards (4chan, etc) are heavily pushing towards WebM for short animations.
  - fl0wenol 10y ago
    Because it is likely that a poster on an imageboard made the video themsevles, rather than reposting in an environment that may only permit simple image links, it encourages them to save it as webm instead of distilling to a GIF (not easy to do properly, very bandwidth intensive on view), which allows the videos to be longer and higher quality while file size caps can be lowered. Mobile users are also thankful for this trend.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Please somebody provide a TLDR. The content is too long and the title too click-baity for me to invest time in reading without what I'm getting myself into.
- ju-st 10y ago
  There's an app for that! http://smmry.com/http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/ http://smmry.com/http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/...
  - Nadya 10y ago
    Sadly that worked pretty poorly. While Giphy was mentioned it was more of a tangent - relating to the overall lifetime of the gif format, its pros and cons. The article is a lengthy article about the history of the .gif format - the recent trend of converting it to a video or video-like format - and this being centered around the ability to share the .gif itself. This is due to many sites (Twitter, Facebook) making it difficult to save a .gif to share later. You need to share the Twitter or FB link instead (which is what they want...). Giphy was mentioned as a way to share .gifs easily, but it has its own limitations (eg: no pornography). It was something that was thought of as a "gimmick" but turned out to be popular. Mostly due to browsers not having good inline video support outside of Flash. I also, in large, blame tooling and discoverability of that tooling for easily creating webm, mp4, or other video formated. For example - if I want to record 8 seconds of a video to turn into a .gif, I can do so easily with an online tool nowadays! If I want that same 8 seconds as a .webm, I now need to find a way to download the source file, trim it down to the 8 seconds I want, save it as an .mp4, then use my .mp4 to .webm converting software to finally have the .webm I wanted. Most people will opt for the shorter/easier .gif conversion.
    - noisem4ker 10y ago
      There actually are online webm converters, just like there are for gif. And if you decide to do it yourself, I don't understand why you'd need to go through an mp4 intermediate. With ffmpeg you can trim and encode your clip to webm with a single command and a couple switches. Or if you want an easy GUI tool, there's always WebM for Gits (https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter )
hartror 10y ago
The limitations of a medium drive creativity, and there is an expectation when publishing a video of a certain quality. Not so with gifs, the format lowers the bar for people to be creative overcoming many expectations of quality.
Waterluvian 10y ago
Can someone point me to how I show full quality animations on an iOS device? I've seen some canvas style spritr sheet solutions but those feel bulky for when I just want a looping animation. WebM has been awesome for animations on desktop but they don't work properly on iOS: won't animate inline.
- reaperhulk 10y ago
  As of iOS 10 autoplay and playsinline on a video element will do what you want as long as the video has no audio track or is muted. No webm of course
  - Waterluvian 10y ago
    Ooh good to know. Thank you. :)
EGreg 10y ago
Animation!
ppod 10y ago
Great article. Gets the tone and level of detail exactly right for talking about something like this to a wide audience.
ausjke 10y ago
It's painful to read the article with fonts/colors/videos came out everywhere. Is there a better and practical format on the way to replace gif since it's dead? I use gif once a while and feel it does its job pretty well.
garaetjjte 10y ago
Actually animated PNGs exist: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Animated_PNG_example_bouncing_beach_ball.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Animated... (though it maybe works only in firefox, idk)
- pix64 10y ago
  Firefox and Safari. Apparently Webkit added support last year (http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/181632 http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/181632)
- feld 10y ago
  APNGs were popular in video slot machines in the late 2000s. I found it intriguing that it was the technology of choice because it seemed so obscure.
kagwang 10y ago
https://vimeo.com/179687726 https://vimeo.com/179687726
justinator 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif
- ec109685 10y ago
  What is the point of that?
- ec109685 10y ago
  What is the point of that?
ianamartin 10y ago
I'm pretty sure everyone is missing the point here. GIF isn't about optimization. It isn't about the best technology. It isn't about anything that we care about as engineers. It's about what is easy for users to create. That's it. That's all there is to it. GIF is easy. It doesn't matter if it sucks. It doesn't matter if it's not optimal. It's easy.
- Ezhik 10y ago
  And there's my problem with how people kill GIF. It's never easy. I right click on a Twitter 'GIF', I can't save it. I go to developer tools, they did a bunch of JavaScript fuckery just so I couldn't save it. Okay, I find a third party tool and save it anyway as a .mp4 file. Stupid. I right click on an Imgur link, it saves a webpage. Okay, replace .gifv with .webm - oh, it redirects me to gifv. Last time I had to save something from Imgur, I had to use curl of all things to do it. It's ridiculous. GIF is simple. You upload the file as an image, something everybody mastered doing, and it will play, no questions asked. Videos are hard. Everybody wants to re-encode them in different formats, everybody has to include a fancy player in an iframe. You have to check for browsers since you can't solely use mp4 because of patent whatever, and can't solely use webm because Apple hates Google that much. GIF, the file format, is bad. 256 colors, file size, etc. But everything people are trying to replace it with is even worse.
  - kijin 10y ago
    Exactly. As the article says: > If GIFs are like framed pictures you can take down and move to your new house, these GIF-like videos are murals painted right onto the wall. In an ideal world, I would be able to bookmark a URL, refer to it 10 years later, and still get the exact same information. Unfortunately, this is not true for any of the image/video hosting services that we use on a daily basis, from Imgur to YouTube. So if I really want to preserve a piece of information for later retrieval, I need to keep a copy on my own computer. I can right-click a GIF and save it as a file, and I'm pretty sure it will stay where I put it for the next 20 years (or more). I don't have the same kind of assurance with most other video formats. Yeah, the GIF is 20 times bigger, but who cares? Disk space is cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. Universal compatibility is hard.
Gankro 10y ago
Great read, but the initial description of the inefficiencies in gif are off. They touch on it a bit at the end but make it vague so I'll explain it here (because I love gif because it's a hillarious mess). Gif is actually a mosaic format. It defines a canvas on which you can render a series of images. By adding a (per image) delay between images, you can make an animation. All this data comes as a stream of blocks. Most are images, but some are extensions. The "NETSCAPE 2.0" extension is what makes gifs loop. Nothing at all says an image needs to fill the whole canvas, and the format for rendering a new image specifies what should happen to the existing pixels. It also can specify a colour to be interpretted as transparent. Gif is also a palletized format, and you can actually abuse this to get more than 256 colours -- each subimage can have its own palette. By picking "leave all the pixels there" as the transition format, you can do non-iframes by overlaying only pixels that have changed. You can also apply many small deltas "at once" with 0-second delays to optimize this further (think: only changing the corners of the image). You can then of course "stick" pixels to a single color of they don't change by much to avoid re-encoding them. The end result of all these tricks is a pretty dramatic compression as one would expect from a "real" video format. It's not great but it's a lot better than the naive encoding described at the start of the article. If you find a real gif that's "live action" and decode the individual frames, you will very likely see all these optimizations in action! Note however that much of this is underspecified! The only reason your animated gifs work is because everyone vaguely agrees on an interpretation of certain things which are honestly quite ambiguous. Firefox's testsuite has a pile of ambiguous gifs which will render messed up in different image viewer applications! Edit: this one is super cool to watch in delta-only mode (don't have that version on hand anymore): https://github.com/Gankro/gif-rs/blob/master/data/cat-jump.gif https://github.com/Gankro/gif-rs/blob/master/data/cat-jump.g...
- aikinai 10y ago
  Do you have a recommendation for an encoder that will make sure to apply all of these optimizations?
xvilka 10y ago
This is web browsers developers fault: Chrome developers actively resisting APNG support [1], while Firefox developers actively resisting WebP support for years [2] and [3]. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1171 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1171 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375
- antisthenes 10y ago
  That Chrome thread is mind-boggling. It dates back 6 years and apparently APNG is still not supported? I don't use Chrome so can't be sure. After going through the Mozilla bug threads, they're even more infuriating from a rational perspective. I guess I didn't realize how politicized software development could be, even in open source.
- xvilka 10y ago
  Mozilla started a new bug (take 3) for WebP support, so you can see the progress here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490
- maxst 10y ago
  The resistance is all but disappeared. No doubt we'll see APNG is Chrome, and WebP in Firefox within a year or so.
  - xvilka 10y ago
    Yes, but looks like it's too late - WebM and MP4 taking over by now.
mxfh 10y ago
While this article excells on the technical aspects of the GIF format, it misses out on the significance of the GIF art renaissance of ca 2011 to 2014, which was most likely initiated by tumblr's arbitrary file size limits. Here is a primer on that: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of-animated-gif-art-part-three-88928 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of-animate...
- tomcam 10y ago
  I'll be danged. Good share. I had wondered why the resurgence.
- maxst 10y ago
  The article is completely wrong about technical aspects of animated GIFs: > Unlike GIFs, video files don't actually contain every frame of animation you see > As a GIF, it takes up more than 60 MB because every single frame needs to be stored as a complete image. This is ridiculous. See http://www.drdobbs.com/optimizing-gif-animations/184412988 http://www.drdobbs.com/optimizing-gif-animations/184412988
deleted 10y ago
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4684499 10y ago
I can google image search gifs, but can't google image search webms.
_fs 10y ago
I know we are supposed to be commenting on the article, but why is this headline "* is dead, long live *" so overused[1] on hackernews. It is so tiring. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22is%20dead%20Long%20live%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22is%20dead%20Long%20live%22&...
- tomcam 10y ago
  Yep--new title is far superior. Actually made me read the article, whereas the old one put me off
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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witty_username 10y ago
To me, GIF = slow loading animation.
rangersanger 10y ago
I had an incredibly hard time concentrating on the article with all the GIF's (or videos, I suppose) looping on the page. Down with the GIF!
digi_owl 10y ago
Never liked gifs. In particular those "joke"/shock gifs that pretend to be a still image. One of the first things i go looking for in a new browser install is some way to stop gifs from animating.
runaway 10y ago
The author is wrong about gifs encoding full frames. Properly encoded gifs only store the pixels that change in each frame. His own example with the dog shows this http://i.imgur.com/wISu3An.png http://i.imgur.com/wISu3An.png
kozak 10y ago
GIF is an excellent example of how constraints facilitate creativity.

247 points by pmcpinto 10y ago

danso 10y ago

That was a nice lengthy read. While the GIF format itself is a bit outdated, I hope the artform of excerpting video/animation into a silent, short-loop never goes out of style. Is it impossible to turn back GIF adoption? What if someone makes the equivalent of Steve Jobs's declaration against Flash? To me, Flash was far more vital to the very operation of web services. Then again, processing GIFs doesn't require near the same complexity or security risks as Flash did.

wodenokoto 10y ago
I think the gifv container format will mostly kill animated gifs in a few years. It promises the silent, looped animations, maintains name recognition, but has good compression.
- lfender6445 10y ago
  the conversation with the imgur ceo was my favorite part of this piece. for those interested: > GIFV is not actually a distinct file format, but it is an MP4 or WebM video that is presented via a HTML 5 video element or an Adobe Flash element with options set so as to make it work similarly to an animated GIF (i.e. endless loop with no video controls visible > http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/GIFV http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/GIFV

fsiefken 10y ago

In the article Battilana is quoted as saying: "Even browsers today don't have a good alternative to GIF unless you want a very sophisticated and still patent-covered video like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4." But we have WebM, works on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and on IE with components https://www.webmproject.org/ie/ https://www.webmproject.org/ie/ - is that not good enough? No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. Chrome has an add-on for it but I don't know about IE. You wonder if the image is smaller when it's a silent video or when it's a APNG, probably it's the same with animated GIF, the movie format is more efficient then the animated image format. Perhaps someone can make a proxy plugin that converts all animated gifs on the fly to webm and all gifs to png. You never have to see these GIFs again, another SaaS subscription model

mjevans 10y ago
It isn't. It has to work on 99.99% of things. People have to actually feel /shocked/ that it doesn't work on a platform for it to be a sufficient replacement.
- byuu 10y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Apparently mobile Safari is the only browser that refuses to support :hover CSS menus, and even though that's maybe 0.1% of my site's traffic, it almost concerns me enough to implement some elaborate workaround. Almost. Anyone that was running a business would not be able to write off a browser as I have. Hell, I still have a Javascript hack for IE8 to support HTML5 tags. Saying, "go fetch these browser plugins to view this page" or lose IE users is an absolute non-starter, unfortunately.
  - guptaneil 10y ago
    I downvoted you and started scrolling away, but then figured it was rude to not give you an explanation, so here it goes... I downvoted you because your comment is difficult to follow. My best interpretation is that you dislike iOS Safari because it doesn't support a specific CSS feature (one that makes little sense on a touch device), but you don't care enough about iOS to find a workaround. However, you do care about IE8 (a browser that was released 7 years ago) enough for it to be a non-starter to ignore it as well. That's an interesting business decision, but to each their own. Regardless, none of your comment seems relevant to the ongoing discussion of replacing gif with webm and the difficulty of finding a universal format. tl;dr ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - cr3ative 10y ago
    How would you implement :hover on a touch screen?
    - byuu 10y ago
      The same way mobile Chrome and mobile Firefox do it: you tap the menu item and the :hover dropdown appears and stays there. Tap outside of the box to make it go away.

SquareWheel 10y ago

It's honestly something I've become quite bitter about. I find the resurgence of the gif has significantly reduced my enjoyment of browsing websites like reddit. Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. When it's appropriate I have no problem with a video. But if posting a video it should really be in its original form. Uploading to Youtube or even just using a <video> tag lets the viewer decide if they want to listen to audio, and what resolution to watch in. It's pretty rare that I'd choose to watch in no sound and at the lowest resolution possible. Not to mention the absurd amount of data gifs download. The recent trend of converting videos into gifs back into videos (websites like gfycat) make even less sense. All you're doing is damaging the quality of the video. To what end? Even articles that are posted are now scattered with gifs. Why? I guess because it's trendy. But it makes it incredibly difficult to focus on the text. The article above is a good (and likely self-aware) example, but this one from Atom also stuck out for me. http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations.html http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations... Terribly nauseating. So that's my rant. Frankly I'd welcome a browser extension to block animated gifs online and hide reddit posts than only link to them.

icebraining 10y ago
Firefox has Gif Block: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/
zyxley 10y ago
> Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator. There's some black humor here in how the actual imageboards (4chan, etc) are heavily pushing towards WebM for short animations.
- fl0wenol 10y ago
  Because it is likely that a poster on an imageboard made the video themsevles, rather than reposting in an environment that may only permit simple image links, it encourages them to save it as webm instead of distilling to a GIF (not easy to do properly, very bandwidth intensive on view), which allows the videos to be longer and higher quality while file size caps can be lowered. Mobile users are also thankful for this trend.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

Please somebody provide a TLDR. The content is too long and the title too click-baity for me to invest time in reading without what I'm getting myself into.

ju-st 10y ago
There's an app for that! http://smmry.com/http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/ http://smmry.com/http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/...
- Nadya 10y ago
  Sadly that worked pretty poorly. While Giphy was mentioned it was more of a tangent - relating to the overall lifetime of the gif format, its pros and cons. The article is a lengthy article about the history of the .gif format - the recent trend of converting it to a video or video-like format - and this being centered around the ability to share the .gif itself. This is due to many sites (Twitter, Facebook) making it difficult to save a .gif to share later. You need to share the Twitter or FB link instead (which is what they want...). Giphy was mentioned as a way to share .gifs easily, but it has its own limitations (eg: no pornography). It was something that was thought of as a "gimmick" but turned out to be popular. Mostly due to browsers not having good inline video support outside of Flash. I also, in large, blame tooling and discoverability of that tooling for easily creating webm, mp4, or other video formated. For example - if I want to record 8 seconds of a video to turn into a .gif, I can do so easily with an online tool nowadays! If I want that same 8 seconds as a .webm, I now need to find a way to download the source file, trim it down to the 8 seconds I want, save it as an .mp4, then use my .mp4 to .webm converting software to finally have the .webm I wanted. Most people will opt for the shorter/easier .gif conversion.
  - noisem4ker 10y ago
    There actually are online webm converters, just like there are for gif. And if you decide to do it yourself, I don't understand why you'd need to go through an mp4 intermediate. With ffmpeg you can trim and encode your clip to webm with a single command and a couple switches. Or if you want an easy GUI tool, there's always WebM for Gits (https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter )

hartror 10y ago

The limitations of a medium drive creativity, and there is an expectation when publishing a video of a certain quality. Not so with gifs, the format lowers the bar for people to be creative overcoming many expectations of quality.

Waterluvian 10y ago

Can someone point me to how I show full quality animations on an iOS device? I've seen some canvas style spritr sheet solutions but those feel bulky for when I just want a looping animation. WebM has been awesome for animations on desktop but they don't work properly on iOS: won't animate inline.

reaperhulk 10y ago
As of iOS 10 autoplay and playsinline on a video element will do what you want as long as the video has no audio track or is muted. No webm of course
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  Ooh good to know. Thank you. :)

EGreg 10y ago

Animation!

ppod 10y ago

Great article. Gets the tone and level of detail exactly right for talking about something like this to a wide audience.

ausjke 10y ago

It's painful to read the article with fonts/colors/videos came out everywhere. Is there a better and practical format on the way to replace gif since it's dead? I use gif once a while and feel it does its job pretty well.

garaetjjte 10y ago

Actually animated PNGs exist: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Animated_PNG_example_bouncing_beach_ball.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Animated... (though it maybe works only in firefox, idk)

pix64 10y ago
Firefox and Safari. Apparently Webkit added support last year (http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/181632 http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/181632)
feld 10y ago
APNGs were popular in video slot machines in the late 2000s. I found it intriguing that it was the technology of choice because it seemed so obscure.

kagwang 10y ago

https://vimeo.com/179687726 https://vimeo.com/179687726

justinator 10y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif

ec109685 10y ago
What is the point of that?
ec109685 10y ago
What is the point of that?

ianamartin 10y ago

I'm pretty sure everyone is missing the point here. GIF isn't about optimization. It isn't about the best technology. It isn't about anything that we care about as engineers. It's about what is easy for users to create. That's it. That's all there is to it. GIF is easy. It doesn't matter if it sucks. It doesn't matter if it's not optimal. It's easy.

Ezhik 10y ago
And there's my problem with how people kill GIF. It's never easy. I right click on a Twitter 'GIF', I can't save it. I go to developer tools, they did a bunch of JavaScript fuckery just so I couldn't save it. Okay, I find a third party tool and save it anyway as a .mp4 file. Stupid. I right click on an Imgur link, it saves a webpage. Okay, replace .gifv with .webm - oh, it redirects me to gifv. Last time I had to save something from Imgur, I had to use curl of all things to do it. It's ridiculous. GIF is simple. You upload the file as an image, something everybody mastered doing, and it will play, no questions asked. Videos are hard. Everybody wants to re-encode them in different formats, everybody has to include a fancy player in an iframe. You have to check for browsers since you can't solely use mp4 because of patent whatever, and can't solely use webm because Apple hates Google that much. GIF, the file format, is bad. 256 colors, file size, etc. But everything people are trying to replace it with is even worse.
- kijin 10y ago
  Exactly. As the article says: > If GIFs are like framed pictures you can take down and move to your new house, these GIF-like videos are murals painted right onto the wall. In an ideal world, I would be able to bookmark a URL, refer to it 10 years later, and still get the exact same information. Unfortunately, this is not true for any of the image/video hosting services that we use on a daily basis, from Imgur to YouTube. So if I really want to preserve a piece of information for later retrieval, I need to keep a copy on my own computer. I can right-click a GIF and save it as a file, and I'm pretty sure it will stay where I put it for the next 20 years (or more). I don't have the same kind of assurance with most other video formats. Yeah, the GIF is 20 times bigger, but who cares? Disk space is cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. Universal compatibility is hard.

Gankro 10y ago

Great read, but the initial description of the inefficiencies in gif are off. They touch on it a bit at the end but make it vague so I'll explain it here (because I love gif because it's a hillarious mess). Gif is actually a mosaic format. It defines a canvas on which you can render a series of images. By adding a (per image) delay between images, you can make an animation. All this data comes as a stream of blocks. Most are images, but some are extensions. The "NETSCAPE 2.0" extension is what makes gifs loop. Nothing at all says an image needs to fill the whole canvas, and the format for rendering a new image specifies what should happen to the existing pixels. It also can specify a colour to be interpretted as transparent. Gif is also a palletized format, and you can actually abuse this to get more than 256 colours -- each subimage can have its own palette. By picking "leave all the pixels there" as the transition format, you can do non-iframes by overlaying only pixels that have changed. You can also apply many small deltas "at once" with 0-second delays to optimize this further (think: only changing the corners of the image). You can then of course "stick" pixels to a single color of they don't change by much to avoid re-encoding them. The end result of all these tricks is a pretty dramatic compression as one would expect from a "real" video format. It's not great but it's a lot better than the naive encoding described at the start of the article. If you find a real gif that's "live action" and decode the individual frames, you will very likely see all these optimizations in action! Note however that much of this is underspecified! The only reason your animated gifs work is because everyone vaguely agrees on an interpretation of certain things which are honestly quite ambiguous. Firefox's testsuite has a pile of ambiguous gifs which will render messed up in different image viewer applications! Edit: this one is super cool to watch in delta-only mode (don't have that version on hand anymore): https://github.com/Gankro/gif-rs/blob/master/data/cat-jump.gif https://github.com/Gankro/gif-rs/blob/master/data/cat-jump.g...

aikinai 10y ago
Do you have a recommendation for an encoder that will make sure to apply all of these optimizations?

xvilka 10y ago

This is web browsers developers fault: Chrome developers actively resisting APNG support [1], while Firefox developers actively resisting WebP support for years [2] and [3]. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1171 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1171 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375

antisthenes 10y ago
That Chrome thread is mind-boggling. It dates back 6 years and apparently APNG is still not supported? I don't use Chrome so can't be sure. After going through the Mozilla bug threads, they're even more infuriating from a rational perspective. I guess I didn't realize how politicized software development could be, even in open source.
xvilka 10y ago
Mozilla started a new bug (take 3) for WebP support, so you can see the progress here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294490
maxst 10y ago
The resistance is all but disappeared. No doubt we'll see APNG is Chrome, and WebP in Firefox within a year or so.
- xvilka 10y ago
  Yes, but looks like it's too late - WebM and MP4 taking over by now.

mxfh 10y ago

While this article excells on the technical aspects of the GIF format, it misses out on the significance of the GIF art renaissance of ca 2011 to 2014, which was most likely initiated by tumblr's arbitrary file size limits. Here is a primer on that: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of-animated-gif-art-part-three-88928 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of-animate...

tomcam 10y ago
I'll be danged. Good share. I had wondered why the resurgence.
maxst 10y ago
The article is completely wrong about technical aspects of animated GIFs: > Unlike GIFs, video files don't actually contain every frame of animation you see > As a GIF, it takes up more than 60 MB because every single frame needs to be stored as a complete image. This is ridiculous. See http://www.drdobbs.com/optimizing-gif-animations/184412988 http://www.drdobbs.com/optimizing-gif-animations/184412988

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4684499 10y ago

I can google image search gifs, but can't google image search webms.

_fs 10y ago

I know we are supposed to be commenting on the article, but why is this headline "* is dead, long live *" so overused[1] on hackernews. It is so tiring. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22is%20dead%20Long%20live%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22is%20dead%20Long%20live%22&...

tomcam 10y ago
Yep--new title is far superior. Actually made me read the article, whereas the old one put me off
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witty_username 10y ago

To me, GIF = slow loading animation.

rangersanger 10y ago

I had an incredibly hard time concentrating on the article with all the GIF's (or videos, I suppose) looping on the page. Down with the GIF!

digi_owl 10y ago

Never liked gifs. In particular those "joke"/shock gifs that pretend to be a still image. One of the first things i go looking for in a new browser install is some way to stop gifs from animating.

runaway 10y ago

The author is wrong about gifs encoding full frames. Properly encoded gifs only store the pixels that change in each frame. His own example with the dog shows this http://i.imgur.com/wISu3An.png http://i.imgur.com/wISu3An.png

kozak 10y ago

GIF is an excellent example of how constraints facilitate creativity.