7 ms·

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 a

by 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.

by chungy 7y ago

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.