13 ms·

Hey Ho, GIFs Must Go (1999)

124 points by gscott 7y ago

chungy 7y ago
More of a historic curiosity these days, the legal reasons to avoid GIFs 20 years ago don't exist anymore, the LZW patents have expired. That being said, PNG always had much stronger compression, in addition to supporting 24- and 32-bit color. Nowadays, we even have WebP that usually compresses better than PNG, and compresses far, far better than animated GIF. Animated GIF is a pretty ugly hack to the format, very inefficient for many common kinds of animations (or full-blown video as it's often used now); I've found that animated WebP can produce files around 10% the size of GIFs.
- mysterydip 7y ago
  Was the original focus on size or performance for animated GIFs? The more you compress something, generally the more processing is required to restore it. I started using the web in the mid 90s, and animated GIFs were everywhere.
  - Enginerrrd 7y ago
    At the data rates we had available in the 90's, size was performance over the internet. I am absolutely incredulous that people choose to use a GIF over a proper video format to share video on places like Reddit in this day and age. I don't understand the motivation to do so.
    - phkahler 7y ago
      Because it's a "gif" not a WebP. If you want a format to catch on, the language needs to roll off the tongue. Even though I hate the word "podcast" and it sounds apple specific even though it's not, it sound a lot better than WebP.
      - geofft 7y ago
        "Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog." https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Well, these days imgur/gfycat will encode your gif as a video. Not sure I even see gifs much anymore. Also, where have you been able to casually upload video to share quick bites like a cat making a funny face? You aren't going to upload a 12 second silent video to youtube. Up until very recently, gifs were the only permissible way to share this sort of content.
    - cm2012 7y ago
      Because gifs can't have volume. I don't want my phone to make noises when I'm browsing the web.
      - bredren 7y ago
        There is also still generally more broadly supported preview rendering of gif vs newer formats. Also probably more addressable / available tools for anim gif creation.
        caro_douglos 7y ago
        Signal messenger doesn’t support webp across devices (last time I checked)....so I use jiffy format
      - harshreality 7y ago
        Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures.
        coribuci 7y ago
        > Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. I think you don't understand the modern web. If something is crappy the user shall have it. JS was always considered crappy but now is the best new thing. And you also missed tbe latest web/UI/UX development. From the web designer point of view the user is an idiot which must be punished for every attempt to customize something. > Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures. They are not UI failures. They are done on purpose.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      The huge advantage of gif was that it went in the <IMG> element. It behaves like a picture that moves, and can be uploaded to picture hosting services. Video, until maybe the last 5 years, didn't.
      - gsich 7y ago
        It still doesn't. No loop control. Yeah you have HTML tags and whatnot, but the loop info must be inside the video itself, not as external metadata.
      - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
        Github is still full of GIFs for exactly this reason.
  - nemo 7y ago
    Pretty sure the original focus was just getting something that worked to display an animation. Animated gifs are an archaic, inefficient video format. Each frame of video is included in the file. You can optimize with a global color table and a few tricks to help cut size but they're incredibly inefficient compared to modern alternatives. Bigger sites like Twitter/Facebook convert gifs to .mp4s and serve .mp4 where possible since it saves a lot of bandwidth.
    - ISL 7y ago
      I suspect the key to the explosion of animated gifs was that everything supported gif and that it was largely incapable of nefarious/annoying activity (unlike flash).
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        There's a fair bit of annoyance possible with GIFs, a fact I exploited when Google+ decided to: 1. Allow animations in the "Hero" user profile image. 2. Make that image permanently fixed to the top of the screen on the profile page. 3. As users increased window size to see more text and less hero, the image would scale to as much as 3/4 of the screen. 4. The hero was included on the "hover card" for users and would show up in all kinds of locations throughout the service. I still have that collection.... I spent an hour or so researching "annoying gifs", and settled on a rapid red-green-blue stroboscopic rotation. I don't know the cycle time, but it was probably a few times per second. Google eventually relented. Well, they eventually shitcanned the whole site, but that's another story. Trying to find animated images that weren't mind-bendingly annoying to me is how I ended up with the "space alien cat" image and avatar. The original had a rotating set of astronomical images in the glasses, I eventually applied the Crab Nebula as a static fill (tried the Cat's Eye, but ironically, it didn't work particularly well). That's the hero I use at several sites (Ello, Mastodon), and is the inspiration to the avatar I use as well. Later at another site at which gratuitous annoying gif use was prevalent, I found a few static-but-apparently-moving optical illusion images, again to make the point that annoying images are annoying. The point was somehow missed by that crowd. That site also died. TL;DR: animated gifs and even static images can be plenty annoying.
    - 7y ago
  - buckminster 7y ago
    I got the impression from the spec that it was originally designed to support retaining the compression dictionary across frames, which would have produced much smaller files at no cost to the decoder. But this wasn't explicit, it didn't get implemented, and the second spec ruled it out. It could have very easily been better. I'm not sure what the moral is.
- grenoire 7y ago
  WebP is lossy though, no? The whole point of PNG is preserving the exact pixel data.
  - javagram 7y ago
    APNG is finally supported in every browser but IE/old Edge, so that case will be fixed soon too. There’s also a lossless webp variant.
  - nebulous1 7y ago
    webp has both lossy and lossless compression
  - daef 7y ago
    https://flif.info https://flif.info beats lossless webm
    - mceachen 7y ago
      https://caniuse.com/#search=Flif https://caniuse.com/#search=Flif is sad, tho.
  - chungy 7y ago
    WebP has lossy and lossless modes. The latter should be considered as the PNG replacement :)
    - zzo38computer 7y ago
      I think FLIF seems better as a PNG replacement. FLIF is a lossless format, although lossy encoding is also available. Still, PNG is much better than GIF, so GIF should not be used unless you need it for use with software that can't use PNG. (This kind of lossy encoding would be possible with PNG too, but most PNG encoders don't have a lossy mode.) (GIF is now patent-free, but PNG and FLIF are still better compression than GIF anyways.)
      - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
- nine_k 7y ago
  Is webP as free as PNG? I remember that its not taking over the world had a licensing component in it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  But not supported by iOS Safari. And APNG not supported by edge. That's why sites like imgur use mp4 videos as an alternative to GIFs. It's not that a bad deal though, one minute of video is roughly 7Mo for something close to DVD quality. I had GIFS lasting a few seconds weighting way more, with terrible quality.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  The article is much more about software patents than one case of their abuse, so it's still very much relevant today.
- WilTimSon 7y ago
  Yeah, it's a time capsule, sure, but a wonderful one. Just this part alone had me rolling: "Actually, they're going to draw on them with red markers -- setting fires in public places is against the law in California." I'm not that well-versed in the matter, is WebP already supported widely? I mean, not just on desktop and advanced smartphones?
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  If you have aliased pixels, gifs can compress much better than video formats. It's really a shame when sites like twitter mangle those files into worse-looking and larger video files. And as a side note: png does not strictly compress better; sometimes the ability to use palette indexes that are smaller than 8 bits is an advantage.
  - chungy 7y ago
    > sometimes the ability to use palette indexes that are smaller than 8 bits is an advantage. PNG does support 4-, 2-, and 1-bit indexed modes :)
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Huh. I wonder what caused those very few color gifs to be smaller then... maybe an encoder shortcoming?
- bbanyc 7y ago
  LZW is a lovely algorithm. It's simple enough to explain in a page of pseudocode and fast enough to run on 1980s hardware easily. The compression rate is "good enough." If not for the patent issue, there'd be no reason to switch to the marginally better Deflate (which was only created in response to the patent). A shame Unisys got greedy and killed it before its time. Though that's got nothing to do with why GIFs got so popular. That's purely because GIF is the only format that could display animations on every browser since 1995. The timing of PNG was rather unfortunate - the PNG team had decided on not supporting animation because GIF animation was rare and adding it to the spec would've unnecessarily complicated things. They froze the spec, planning to submit it to W3C and IETF for standardization - and then Netscape, in full "move fast and break things" mode, released Navigator 2 with animated GIF support. So soon every GeoCities page is full of annoying sparkly GIFs, PNG only lets you make boring stills, and we've got to support both formats forever.
  - SiVal 7y ago
    Well, a successor to JPEG called JPEG XL[1] that adds lossless compression, better lossy compression, the ability to further compress and then losslessly restore a traditional JPEG, HDR, animation, alpha channel, lots of other technical improvements, and a commitment by a long list of major players that if one of their patents is involved, it will be licensed at zero cost...is still scheduled to be officially published this month (Oct 2019). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#JPEG_XL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#JPEG_XL
    - gsich 7y ago
      JPEG also has lossless compression
  - userbinator 7y ago
    It's simple enough to explain in a page of pseudocode More like a paragraph... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch#Encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Wel... Personally, I like LZ more than LZW because it doesn't have to slowly "build up" the dictionary in the same way as LZW nor need bit-I/O (because you can have an 8, 16, or 32-bit "indicator", followed by that many literal or length/distance pairs) and thus makes for an even simpler (and faster) algorithm. The only downside is that it's more asymmetric, in that compression is usually far slower than decompression (which can be faster than memcpy() - see http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088 http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088 ) because the former has to do a lot of searching while the latter is mainly copying memory.
- maxst 7y ago
  >I've found that animated WebP can produce files around 10% the size of GIFs. For nicely optimized GIFs like these https://iwdrm.tumblr.com/ https://iwdrm.tumblr.com/ then WebP really struggles. Try to convert some of them to WebP and you'll see the result is often bigger than the original GIF.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I don't know much about webp (my build of ffmpeg doesn't support it), but those gifs don't seem so small to me. Using the first gif on that page: Input #0, gif, from 'tumblr_nxt634tytr1qe0eclo3_r1_500.gif': Duration: 00:00:08.64, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1434 kb/s Stream #0:0: Video: gif, bgra, 500x269, 16.67 fps, 16.67 tbr, 100 tbn, 100 tbc vs Input #0, matroska,webm, from 'bar.webm': Duration: 00:00:08.64, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 252 kb/s Stream #0:0: Video: vp9 (Profile 0), yuv420p(tv), 500x269, SAR 1:1 DAR 500:269, 16.67 fps, 16.67 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc (default) 1434kb/s for the gif, vs 252 kb/s for the VP9 webm. Even this highly optimized gif is only highly optimized by gif standards.
    - maxst 7y ago
      I'm talking about WebP vs GIF. Not about video.
deleted 7y ago
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danso 7y ago
> In 1984 the writer Stewart Brand observed that "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient." The result, he said, is a tension that "will not go away." Information is so incredibly cheap to distribute and copy today that I forget it was still very cheap to do so even before the Internet.
- semiotagonal 7y ago
  Brand was prescient about the tension not going away. Thirty-five years on, we've got paywalls, news aggregation, streaming music, vinyl records, all fighting it out.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The concept, if not the wording, pre-dates Brand, going back to Michael Polanyi, Norbert Wiener, and others (1940s - 1960s).
kuiooullkre 7y ago
Because browsers are now disabling autoplay even for silent videos, GIFs are going to be with us for at least another 10 years.
- karmakaze 7y ago
  There's no rational reason why a browser should autoplay a GIF and not a silent video.
  - mattmaroon 7y ago
    True. I don't care about the file format so much as whether or not it has sound and how big it is.
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    There are a lot of people asking to disable autoplay even on silent videos. The main reason is they want to save bandwidth. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102
    - sp332 7y ago
      Firefox Nightly supports this and I use it. It's not perfect but overall I'd say it's better than letting videos autoplay.
- thinkloop 7y ago
  You can disable gif autoplay
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    There was a relatively well-known binary edit of the Netscape browser which would disable the looping of GIFs. Animations would animate, but only play through once. https://web.archive.org/web/20040116134137/linuxmafia.com/faq/Web/animated-gif-killing.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040116134137/linuxmafia.com/fa...
thanatropism 7y ago
GIFs are short, silent looping videos that work nothing like videos in consumer appliances have ever worked: they don't have pause, rewind or fast-forward controls; part of the effect is that on the first run they tend to run in slow-mo as they progressively download and subsequently run snappy, at times startlingly so. No technical committee or even loose-consensus-running-code working group would ever come up with anything like that. The mode of pop-culture remixing that GIFs epitomize could never have been anticipated; the value that defaulting to silence delivers has still not gotten through to news sites (good ones, too!) that autoplay talking video over your headphones or god forbid the open plan office; it's even been reported[0] that porn works better for women in GIF mode. That's because GIFs were never conceived for video. Consumer computer video was never conceived for pop culture remixing (despite having the experience of turntables to pick from). Porn was never conceived for women, for that matter. GIFs are legacy left for us from a time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the erection of the EU castle when everyone expected planning and bureaucracy to lose out to spontaneity bordering on anarchy. Many important HN recurring themes are here: privacy vs. normalized surveillance, free speech x hate speech x rogue counter-establishment right-wing speech, the freaking Mac App Store. Every "hacker" that defaults to the safe repressive position is someone who would rather that GIF looked that those barely-working WebM or whatever embeds found on Wikipedia, with little transport controls, bureaucratic efficiency and that wrongthink GIF memes were somehow blocked by "good DRM, DRM that prevents Putin from attacking the system". Which system? The one that brought us Medium.com when we used to have Geocities. But we'll always have GIFs. [0] https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-tumblr https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-tumblr
- azinman2 7y ago
  Actually GIFs were originally mainly for still image transfer — that they had more than 5 frames of animation is a recent phenomenon due to rising data transfer rates. All this pop culture stuff comes over a decade from when the GIF was invented.
- catalogia 7y ago
  > "GIFs [...] don't have pause, rewind or fast-forward controls;" They do for me, because I view them with software that chooses to support such things. It really has nothing to do with the format itself.
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mmahemoff 7y ago
What people call GIFs (however they pronounce it!) are nowadays more likely to be delivered as video files in reality. It's more of a human-centric label for "short+looping+silent+autoplay video" than a tech-centric file format. A tad ironic given there's no longer a patent issue on the actual format.
- pokstad 7y ago
  There should just be a video format called "loopies" that just wrap an existing format with these qualities.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Already exists: gifv https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/208606616-What-is-GIFV- https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/208606616-What-is-G... Nothing on imgur.com's homepage is a gif, for example. Same with gfycat.com.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Agathos 7y ago
      Yeah, but I can't use the [img] tag to inline a .gifv on a random phpBB-like forum. So I still have to save the unconverted .gif somewhere.
    - superkuh 7y ago
      Nothing on imgur's homepage will display without executing javascript. And no webm inside of a .gifv name will run in a loop without javascript. In fact getting it to run the first time requires user interaction or javascript execution too.
      - AgentME 7y ago
        A <video> tag can play a webm without needing any javascript, and it has an attribute to enable running in a loop.
rbx 7y ago
with GIF i can easily right click it and do a similar image search. Does something like this exist for video?
rbx 7y ago
Many times if GIF is converted to video it will ruin the pixel art, or in some cases even produce bigger file [1]. I get the efficiency argument for conversion to video, but in some cases it is a no-go. There should always be an option to not convert to video. [1] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6403 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6403
- catalogia 7y ago
  > "in some cases even produce bigger file [1]." The dancing star gif posted in that github issue is 5,464 bytes in the original form and only 4,015 bytes when converted to a VP9 webm (with alpha channel) using ffmpeg's default settings. > "There should always be an option to not convert to video." I disagree. The conversion should be automatic. The converted result should then be compared against the original, and whichever is smaller should be sent to users. There may well be gifs that are smaller than their conversions, but I don't trust users to know which those are. Let the computer compare the two and make an objective decision.
- azinman2 7y ago
  This article is less about GIFs being animated memes today and more about being the standard (at one time) way to send images between computers.
leeoniya 7y ago
for certain types of content i still prefer gifs (e.g. pixel art). i've written a couple libs that help record canvas pixel art to gifs. https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js/ https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js/ https://github.com/leeoniya/GIFter.js https://github.com/leeoniya/GIFter.js btw, always compress with https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/ https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/ it's amazing.
cloudking 7y ago
GIFs will be around for a simple reason: memes It's the only format that works pretty much everywhere on every platform
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Most meme "gifs" are actually being delivered as video data these days.
  - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
    And it completely falls apart sometime. GIFs actually work but try browsing Reddit’s video alternative to GIFs anywhere outside of the reddit office and it struggles to even play for a second. We have engineers replacing tech that works with their half baked barley functioning versions that lose all the benefits of sharing and remixability of a GIF file.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      I don't understand what you're saying. I'm sure the video files reddit serves are perfectly playable in standard video players, since web browsers can obviously handle them. If download bandwidth is the concern, you should know it would be even worse with gif files, which are much larger than visually equivalent animated gifs. If reddit were serving up real gifs, they would load even slower. Video files are easier to share, on account of being smaller, and easier to edit since you can use real video editing tools which is a lot easier than editing a gif frame by frame in gimp. The only sense in which gifs are superior is they're easier to write a parser/renderer for from scratch, but I think that's relevant to virtually nobody.
      - jodrellblank 7y ago
        Gif: loads (slowly); plays. Video: loads video player controls (slowly); waits; doesn’t start playing; starts playing but doesn’t let me choose volume quickly enough; stops playing; loading; jumps several seconds; appears to be at the end but isn’t finished loading; won’t loop; try to rewind or jump to position; doesn’t work; UI controls appear to have disconnected from anything; can’t rewind replay or watch; get annoyed; reload page entirely or quit it. This is where you dismiss everything I’ve written with an “it doesn’t happen” because “you’re sure” videos are “perfectly playable” and “obviously work”, but you’re wrong, they don’t, they have glaring huge UX failure modes I hit all the time for years on mobile Safari with a normal person not mega fast internet connection.
dredmorbius 7y ago
The key lesson here is not about a specific image format or company, but the fact that even a very light assertion or even hint of proprietary restrictions can kill or handicap a nascent technology or protocol in the bud. The age of early hypertext was awash in such cases. The University of Minnesota only mentioned that they might introduce a charge for gopher servers, effectively killing the protocol. Various early conferencing and hypertext systems, including one from Sun Microsystems (NEWS?), and a few models from Microsoft, existed. Somewhere, Tim O'Reilly has commented about the early days of O'Reilly & Associates where he was looking at various options and made the early decision to not get locked into any one proprietary system, a choice which has paid handsomly. The whole phenomenon of prortocol creation, promotion, evolution, and quite often, stagnation, is a fascinating and understudied one IMO. The role of non-market players, particularly government standards organisations, the military, and academic fields, is extraordinarily underappreciated.
- Jd 7y ago
  Completely agree with and the sad thing is I don't even know where to point someone to learn about bout the roll that "government standards organisations, the military, and academic fields" play, except to talk to leaders of individual W3C groups.
  - jrumbut 7y ago
    A lot of discussion of early web technologies, like MOSAIC and HTML, took place in newsgroups that are still recorded and displayed online. Not sure I've seen protocol discussions there (just never bothered to look) but it shows a whole lot of academics and government employees in the mix, and some commercial actors as well. It's disappointing since those programs succeeded beyond the dreams of avarice but were not designed to gather publicity. The fact that so much of our economic growth is undergirded by public research funding is forgotten even by direct beneficiaries.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      I was going to suggest the IETF and RFCs as a trove of standards-setting activity. There should be a few other similar ones. There's an interesting transition as those groups moved from small (able to fit into a VW Bug, bus, or small bar) to large (auditorium, or multi-campus groups), and the relative frictions in new developments. Past a certain scale, the easiest way to change a standard is to move forward, either abandoning or ignoring backwards compatibility. Both software languages and various social networking protocols (there are ... many) are interesting cases in point. Mastodon is in many ways IRC v. 2.0 (and there are any number of competing contenders). There actually was (and/or is, depending on your judging criteria) a Usenet II, though it's seen limited popularity. Another good source on much of this would be the late Pieter Hintjins. See for example: https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architecture-by-pieter-hintjens https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architectur...
tinus_hn 7y ago
So strange how Unisys caused al these problems but I doubt it made them much money.
thrower123 7y ago
I'm not sure I've seen a whole lot of GIFs in the wild lately - mostly they seem to be getting converted to mp4 on the fly by most of the hosting services, no?
harry8 7y ago
Anyone have an estimate of how much revenue increase the patent office received as a result of allowing software patents while knowing nothing at all, whatsoever about software? How many of the things have been granted? How many filed? How much are the filing fees? How much are typical lawyering fees for it. There are many among us who feel it is the actions of pure parasites on genuine tech innovation in software and systems so it's a question of how much was gouged by that decision (intentionally or otherwise). The other one that could be interesting to know is the descriptive stats on salaries for patent attourneys specialising in software vs people being paid to program software.

124 points by gscott 7y ago

More of a historic curiosity these days, the legal reasons to avoid GIFs 20 years ago don't exist anymore, the LZW patents have expired. That being said, PNG always had much stronger compression, in addition to supporting 24- and 32-bit color. Nowadays, we even have WebP that usually compresses better than PNG, and compresses far, far better than animated GIF. Animated GIF is a pretty ugly hack to the format, very inefficient for many common kinds of animations (or full-blown video as it's often used now); I've found that animated WebP can produce files around 10% the size of GIFs.

mysterydip 7y ago
Was the original focus on size or performance for animated GIFs? The more you compress something, generally the more processing is required to restore it. I started using the web in the mid 90s, and animated GIFs were everywhere.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  At the data rates we had available in the 90's, size was performance over the internet. I am absolutely incredulous that people choose to use a GIF over a proper video format to share video on places like Reddit in this day and age. I don't understand the motivation to do so.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Because it's a "gif" not a WebP. If you want a format to catch on, the language needs to roll off the tongue. Even though I hate the word "podcast" and it sounds apple specific even though it's not, it sound a lot better than WebP.
    - geofft 7y ago
      "Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog." https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Well, these days imgur/gfycat will encode your gif as a video. Not sure I even see gifs much anymore. Also, where have you been able to casually upload video to share quick bites like a cat making a funny face? You aren't going to upload a 12 second silent video to youtube. Up until very recently, gifs were the only permissible way to share this sort of content.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    Because gifs can't have volume. I don't want my phone to make noises when I'm browsing the web.
    - bredren 7y ago
      There is also still generally more broadly supported preview rendering of gif vs newer formats. Also probably more addressable / available tools for anim gif creation.
      - caro_douglos 7y ago
        Signal messenger doesn’t support webp across devices (last time I checked)....so I use jiffy format
    - harshreality 7y ago
      Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures.
      - coribuci 7y ago
        > Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. I think you don't understand the modern web. If something is crappy the user shall have it. JS was always considered crappy but now is the best new thing. And you also missed tbe latest web/UI/UX development. From the web designer point of view the user is an idiot which must be punished for every attempt to customize something. > Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures. They are not UI failures. They are done on purpose.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    The huge advantage of gif was that it went in the <IMG> element. It behaves like a picture that moves, and can be uploaded to picture hosting services. Video, until maybe the last 5 years, didn't.
    - gsich 7y ago
      It still doesn't. No loop control. Yeah you have HTML tags and whatnot, but the loop info must be inside the video itself, not as external metadata.
    - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
      Github is still full of GIFs for exactly this reason.
- nemo 7y ago
  Pretty sure the original focus was just getting something that worked to display an animation. Animated gifs are an archaic, inefficient video format. Each frame of video is included in the file. You can optimize with a global color table and a few tricks to help cut size but they're incredibly inefficient compared to modern alternatives. Bigger sites like Twitter/Facebook convert gifs to .mp4s and serve .mp4 where possible since it saves a lot of bandwidth.
  - ISL 7y ago
    I suspect the key to the explosion of animated gifs was that everything supported gif and that it was largely incapable of nefarious/annoying activity (unlike flash).
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      There's a fair bit of annoyance possible with GIFs, a fact I exploited when Google+ decided to: 1. Allow animations in the "Hero" user profile image. 2. Make that image permanently fixed to the top of the screen on the profile page. 3. As users increased window size to see more text and less hero, the image would scale to as much as 3/4 of the screen. 4. The hero was included on the "hover card" for users and would show up in all kinds of locations throughout the service. I still have that collection.... I spent an hour or so researching "annoying gifs", and settled on a rapid red-green-blue stroboscopic rotation. I don't know the cycle time, but it was probably a few times per second. Google eventually relented. Well, they eventually shitcanned the whole site, but that's another story. Trying to find animated images that weren't mind-bendingly annoying to me is how I ended up with the "space alien cat" image and avatar. The original had a rotating set of astronomical images in the glasses, I eventually applied the Crab Nebula as a static fill (tried the Cat's Eye, but ironically, it didn't work particularly well). That's the hero I use at several sites (Ello, Mastodon), and is the inspiration to the avatar I use as well. Later at another site at which gratuitous annoying gif use was prevalent, I found a few static-but-apparently-moving optical illusion images, again to make the point that annoying images are annoying. The point was somehow missed by that crowd. That site also died. TL;DR: animated gifs and even static images can be plenty annoying.
  - 7y ago
- buckminster 7y ago
  I got the impression from the spec that it was originally designed to support retaining the compression dictionary across frames, which would have produced much smaller files at no cost to the decoder. But this wasn't explicit, it didn't get implemented, and the second spec ruled it out. It could have very easily been better. I'm not sure what the moral is.
grenoire 7y ago
WebP is lossy though, no? The whole point of PNG is preserving the exact pixel data.
- javagram 7y ago
  APNG is finally supported in every browser but IE/old Edge, so that case will be fixed soon too. There’s also a lossless webp variant.
- nebulous1 7y ago
  webp has both lossy and lossless compression
- daef 7y ago
  https://flif.info https://flif.info beats lossless webm
  - mceachen 7y ago
    https://caniuse.com/#search=Flif https://caniuse.com/#search=Flif is sad, tho.
- chungy 7y ago
  WebP has lossy and lossless modes. The latter should be considered as the PNG replacement :)
  - zzo38computer 7y ago
    I think FLIF seems better as a PNG replacement. FLIF is a lossless format, although lossy encoding is also available. Still, PNG is much better than GIF, so GIF should not be used unless you need it for use with software that can't use PNG. (This kind of lossy encoding would be possible with PNG too, but most PNG encoders don't have a lossy mode.) (GIF is now patent-free, but PNG and FLIF are still better compression than GIF anyways.)
    - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
nine_k 7y ago
Is webP as free as PNG? I remember that its not taking over the world had a licensing component in it.
deleted 7y ago
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BiteCode_dev 7y ago
But not supported by iOS Safari. And APNG not supported by edge. That's why sites like imgur use mp4 videos as an alternative to GIFs. It's not that a bad deal though, one minute of video is roughly 7Mo for something close to DVD quality. I had GIFS lasting a few seconds weighting way more, with terrible quality.
Symbiote 7y ago
The article is much more about software patents than one case of their abuse, so it's still very much relevant today.
WilTimSon 7y ago
Yeah, it's a time capsule, sure, but a wonderful one. Just this part alone had me rolling: "Actually, they're going to draw on them with red markers -- setting fires in public places is against the law in California." I'm not that well-versed in the matter, is WebP already supported widely? I mean, not just on desktop and advanced smartphones?
Dylan16807 7y ago
If you have aliased pixels, gifs can compress much better than video formats. It's really a shame when sites like twitter mangle those files into worse-looking and larger video files. And as a side note: png does not strictly compress better; sometimes the ability to use palette indexes that are smaller than 8 bits is an advantage.
- chungy 7y ago
  > sometimes the ability to use palette indexes that are smaller than 8 bits is an advantage. PNG does support 4-, 2-, and 1-bit indexed modes :)
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Huh. I wonder what caused those very few color gifs to be smaller then... maybe an encoder shortcoming?
bbanyc 7y ago
LZW is a lovely algorithm. It's simple enough to explain in a page of pseudocode and fast enough to run on 1980s hardware easily. The compression rate is "good enough." If not for the patent issue, there'd be no reason to switch to the marginally better Deflate (which was only created in response to the patent). A shame Unisys got greedy and killed it before its time. Though that's got nothing to do with why GIFs got so popular. That's purely because GIF is the only format that could display animations on every browser since 1995. The timing of PNG was rather unfortunate - the PNG team had decided on not supporting animation because GIF animation was rare and adding it to the spec would've unnecessarily complicated things. They froze the spec, planning to submit it to W3C and IETF for standardization - and then Netscape, in full "move fast and break things" mode, released Navigator 2 with animated GIF support. So soon every GeoCities page is full of annoying sparkly GIFs, PNG only lets you make boring stills, and we've got to support both formats forever.
- SiVal 7y ago
  Well, a successor to JPEG called JPEG XL[1] that adds lossless compression, better lossy compression, the ability to further compress and then losslessly restore a traditional JPEG, HDR, animation, alpha channel, lots of other technical improvements, and a commitment by a long list of major players that if one of their patents is involved, it will be licensed at zero cost...is still scheduled to be officially published this month (Oct 2019). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#JPEG_XL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#JPEG_XL
  - gsich 7y ago
    JPEG also has lossless compression
- userbinator 7y ago
  It's simple enough to explain in a page of pseudocode More like a paragraph... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch#Encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Wel... Personally, I like LZ more than LZW because it doesn't have to slowly "build up" the dictionary in the same way as LZW nor need bit-I/O (because you can have an 8, 16, or 32-bit "indicator", followed by that many literal or length/distance pairs) and thus makes for an even simpler (and faster) algorithm. The only downside is that it's more asymmetric, in that compression is usually far slower than decompression (which can be faster than memcpy() - see http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088 http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088 ) because the former has to do a lot of searching while the latter is mainly copying memory.
maxst 7y ago
>I've found that animated WebP can produce files around 10% the size of GIFs. For nicely optimized GIFs like these https://iwdrm.tumblr.com/ https://iwdrm.tumblr.com/ then WebP really struggles. Try to convert some of them to WebP and you'll see the result is often bigger than the original GIF.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I don't know much about webp (my build of ffmpeg doesn't support it), but those gifs don't seem so small to me. Using the first gif on that page: Input #0, gif, from 'tumblr_nxt634tytr1qe0eclo3_r1_500.gif': Duration: 00:00:08.64, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1434 kb/s Stream #0:0: Video: gif, bgra, 500x269, 16.67 fps, 16.67 tbr, 100 tbn, 100 tbc vs Input #0, matroska,webm, from 'bar.webm': Duration: 00:00:08.64, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 252 kb/s Stream #0:0: Video: vp9 (Profile 0), yuv420p(tv), 500x269, SAR 1:1 DAR 500:269, 16.67 fps, 16.67 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc (default) 1434kb/s for the gif, vs 252 kb/s for the VP9 webm. Even this highly optimized gif is only highly optimized by gif standards.
  - maxst 7y ago
    I'm talking about WebP vs GIF. Not about video.

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danso 7y ago

> In 1984 the writer Stewart Brand observed that "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient." The result, he said, is a tension that "will not go away." Information is so incredibly cheap to distribute and copy today that I forget it was still very cheap to do so even before the Internet.

semiotagonal 7y ago
Brand was prescient about the tension not going away. Thirty-five years on, we've got paywalls, news aggregation, streaming music, vinyl records, all fighting it out.
dredmorbius 7y ago
The concept, if not the wording, pre-dates Brand, going back to Michael Polanyi, Norbert Wiener, and others (1940s - 1960s).

kuiooullkre 7y ago

Because browsers are now disabling autoplay even for silent videos, GIFs are going to be with us for at least another 10 years.

karmakaze 7y ago
There's no rational reason why a browser should autoplay a GIF and not a silent video.
- mattmaroon 7y ago
  True. I don't care about the file format so much as whether or not it has sound and how big it is.
- Thorrez 7y ago
  There are a lot of people asking to disable autoplay even on silent videos. The main reason is they want to save bandwidth. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102
  - sp332 7y ago
    Firefox Nightly supports this and I use it. It's not perfect but overall I'd say it's better than letting videos autoplay.
thinkloop 7y ago
You can disable gif autoplay
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  There was a relatively well-known binary edit of the Netscape browser which would disable the looping of GIFs. Animations would animate, but only play through once. https://web.archive.org/web/20040116134137/linuxmafia.com/faq/Web/animated-gif-killing.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040116134137/linuxmafia.com/fa...

thanatropism 7y ago

GIFs are short, silent looping videos that work nothing like videos in consumer appliances have ever worked: they don't have pause, rewind or fast-forward controls; part of the effect is that on the first run they tend to run in slow-mo as they progressively download and subsequently run snappy, at times startlingly so. No technical committee or even loose-consensus-running-code working group would ever come up with anything like that. The mode of pop-culture remixing that GIFs epitomize could never have been anticipated; the value that defaulting to silence delivers has still not gotten through to news sites (good ones, too!) that autoplay talking video over your headphones or god forbid the open plan office; it's even been reported[0] that porn works better for women in GIF mode. That's because GIFs were never conceived for video. Consumer computer video was never conceived for pop culture remixing (despite having the experience of turntables to pick from). Porn was never conceived for women, for that matter. GIFs are legacy left for us from a time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the erection of the EU castle when everyone expected planning and bureaucracy to lose out to spontaneity bordering on anarchy. Many important HN recurring themes are here: privacy vs. normalized surveillance, free speech x hate speech x rogue counter-establishment right-wing speech, the freaking Mac App Store. Every "hacker" that defaults to the safe repressive position is someone who would rather that GIF looked that those barely-working WebM or whatever embeds found on Wikipedia, with little transport controls, bureaucratic efficiency and that wrongthink GIF memes were somehow blocked by "good DRM, DRM that prevents Putin from attacking the system". Which system? The one that brought us Medium.com when we used to have Geocities. But we'll always have GIFs. [0] https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-tumblr https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-tumblr

azinman2 7y ago
Actually GIFs were originally mainly for still image transfer — that they had more than 5 frames of animation is a recent phenomenon due to rising data transfer rates. All this pop culture stuff comes over a decade from when the GIF was invented.
catalogia 7y ago
> "GIFs [...] don't have pause, rewind or fast-forward controls;" They do for me, because I view them with software that chooses to support such things. It really has nothing to do with the format itself.

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mmahemoff 7y ago

What people call GIFs (however they pronounce it!) are nowadays more likely to be delivered as video files in reality. It's more of a human-centric label for "short+looping+silent+autoplay video" than a tech-centric file format. A tad ironic given there's no longer a patent issue on the actual format.

pokstad 7y ago
There should just be a video format called "loopies" that just wrap an existing format with these qualities.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Already exists: gifv https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/208606616-What-is-GIFV- https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/208606616-What-is-G... Nothing on imgur.com's homepage is a gif, for example. Same with gfycat.com.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Agathos 7y ago
    Yeah, but I can't use the [img] tag to inline a .gifv on a random phpBB-like forum. So I still have to save the unconverted .gif somewhere.
  - superkuh 7y ago
    Nothing on imgur's homepage will display without executing javascript. And no webm inside of a .gifv name will run in a loop without javascript. In fact getting it to run the first time requires user interaction or javascript execution too.
    - AgentME 7y ago
      A <video> tag can play a webm without needing any javascript, and it has an attribute to enable running in a loop.

rbx 7y ago

with GIF i can easily right click it and do a similar image search. Does something like this exist for video?

rbx 7y ago

Many times if GIF is converted to video it will ruin the pixel art, or in some cases even produce bigger file [1]. I get the efficiency argument for conversion to video, but in some cases it is a no-go. There should always be an option to not convert to video. [1] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6403 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6403

catalogia 7y ago
> "in some cases even produce bigger file [1]." The dancing star gif posted in that github issue is 5,464 bytes in the original form and only 4,015 bytes when converted to a VP9 webm (with alpha channel) using ffmpeg's default settings. > "There should always be an option to not convert to video." I disagree. The conversion should be automatic. The converted result should then be compared against the original, and whichever is smaller should be sent to users. There may well be gifs that are smaller than their conversions, but I don't trust users to know which those are. Let the computer compare the two and make an objective decision.
azinman2 7y ago
This article is less about GIFs being animated memes today and more about being the standard (at one time) way to send images between computers.

leeoniya 7y ago

for certain types of content i still prefer gifs (e.g. pixel art). i've written a couple libs that help record canvas pixel art to gifs. https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js/ https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js/ https://github.com/leeoniya/GIFter.js https://github.com/leeoniya/GIFter.js btw, always compress with https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/ https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/ it's amazing.

cloudking 7y ago

GIFs will be around for a simple reason: memes It's the only format that works pretty much everywhere on every platform

zamadatix 7y ago
Most meme "gifs" are actually being delivered as video data these days.
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  And it completely falls apart sometime. GIFs actually work but try browsing Reddit’s video alternative to GIFs anywhere outside of the reddit office and it struggles to even play for a second. We have engineers replacing tech that works with their half baked barley functioning versions that lose all the benefits of sharing and remixability of a GIF file.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I don't understand what you're saying. I'm sure the video files reddit serves are perfectly playable in standard video players, since web browsers can obviously handle them. If download bandwidth is the concern, you should know it would be even worse with gif files, which are much larger than visually equivalent animated gifs. If reddit were serving up real gifs, they would load even slower. Video files are easier to share, on account of being smaller, and easier to edit since you can use real video editing tools which is a lot easier than editing a gif frame by frame in gimp. The only sense in which gifs are superior is they're easier to write a parser/renderer for from scratch, but I think that's relevant to virtually nobody.
    - jodrellblank 7y ago
      Gif: loads (slowly); plays. Video: loads video player controls (slowly); waits; doesn’t start playing; starts playing but doesn’t let me choose volume quickly enough; stops playing; loading; jumps several seconds; appears to be at the end but isn’t finished loading; won’t loop; try to rewind or jump to position; doesn’t work; UI controls appear to have disconnected from anything; can’t rewind replay or watch; get annoyed; reload page entirely or quit it. This is where you dismiss everything I’ve written with an “it doesn’t happen” because “you’re sure” videos are “perfectly playable” and “obviously work”, but you’re wrong, they don’t, they have glaring huge UX failure modes I hit all the time for years on mobile Safari with a normal person not mega fast internet connection.

dredmorbius 7y ago

The key lesson here is not about a specific image format or company, but the fact that even a very light assertion or even hint of proprietary restrictions can kill or handicap a nascent technology or protocol in the bud. The age of early hypertext was awash in such cases. The University of Minnesota only mentioned that they might introduce a charge for gopher servers, effectively killing the protocol. Various early conferencing and hypertext systems, including one from Sun Microsystems (NEWS?), and a few models from Microsoft, existed. Somewhere, Tim O'Reilly has commented about the early days of O'Reilly & Associates where he was looking at various options and made the early decision to not get locked into any one proprietary system, a choice which has paid handsomly. The whole phenomenon of prortocol creation, promotion, evolution, and quite often, stagnation, is a fascinating and understudied one IMO. The role of non-market players, particularly government standards organisations, the military, and academic fields, is extraordinarily underappreciated.

Jd 7y ago
Completely agree with and the sad thing is I don't even know where to point someone to learn about bout the roll that "government standards organisations, the military, and academic fields" play, except to talk to leaders of individual W3C groups.
- jrumbut 7y ago
  A lot of discussion of early web technologies, like MOSAIC and HTML, took place in newsgroups that are still recorded and displayed online. Not sure I've seen protocol discussions there (just never bothered to look) but it shows a whole lot of academics and government employees in the mix, and some commercial actors as well. It's disappointing since those programs succeeded beyond the dreams of avarice but were not designed to gather publicity. The fact that so much of our economic growth is undergirded by public research funding is forgotten even by direct beneficiaries.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I was going to suggest the IETF and RFCs as a trove of standards-setting activity. There should be a few other similar ones. There's an interesting transition as those groups moved from small (able to fit into a VW Bug, bus, or small bar) to large (auditorium, or multi-campus groups), and the relative frictions in new developments. Past a certain scale, the easiest way to change a standard is to move forward, either abandoning or ignoring backwards compatibility. Both software languages and various social networking protocols (there are ... many) are interesting cases in point. Mastodon is in many ways IRC v. 2.0 (and there are any number of competing contenders). There actually was (and/or is, depending on your judging criteria) a Usenet II, though it's seen limited popularity. Another good source on much of this would be the late Pieter Hintjins. See for example: https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architecture-by-pieter-hintjens https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architectur...

tinus_hn 7y ago

So strange how Unisys caused al these problems but I doubt it made them much money.

thrower123 7y ago

I'm not sure I've seen a whole lot of GIFs in the wild lately - mostly they seem to be getting converted to mp4 on the fly by most of the hosting services, no?

harry8 7y ago

Anyone have an estimate of how much revenue increase the patent office received as a result of allowing software patents while knowing nothing at all, whatsoever about software? How many of the things have been granted? How many filed? How much are the filing fees? How much are typical lawyering fees for it. There are many among us who feel it is the actions of pure parasites on genuine tech innovation in software and systems so it's a question of how much was gouged by that decision (intentionally or otherwise). The other one that could be interesting to know is the descriptive stats on salaries for patent attourneys specialising in software vs people being paid to program software.