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Pretty sure the original focus was just getting something that worked to display an animation. Animated gifs are an archaic, inefficient video format. Each fram

by 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.
jacquesm 7y ago
> Each frame of video is included in the file. There is a trick where subsequent frames use transparency for non-changed parts of the image which gives a much better compression ratio than you might think.
- leeoniya 7y ago
  this works well if you have a static background and a moving sprite. no so much if your background moves (or video).
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    The animated gifs that were everwhere generally were pixel animations rather than video.
    - leeoniya 7y ago
      well sure, when we had little bandwidth to even download a photo.
      - PavlovsCat 7y ago
        Not all animated pixel art was for lack of video, just like not all ascii art was and is for lack of images. Recording a video is a wholly different process to animating a 16x16 smiley. If anything, at least by now, I think more people record video because they can't draw, than people draw because they can't afford the equipment or bandwith for video.
- bbanyc 7y ago
  There's also the trick where you can redefine the palette for each consecutive frame, and set the "delay" between frames to zero, in order to get more than 256 colors in a single image. This is so horrendously inefficient it should be a crime. But it's still a GIF, and anything that can display animated GIFs can display it too.
  - 7y ago

by nemo 7y ago

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.

jacquesm 7y ago

> Each frame of video is included in the file. There is a trick where subsequent frames use transparency for non-changed parts of the image which gives a much better compression ratio than you might think.

leeoniya 7y ago
this works well if you have a static background and a moving sprite. no so much if your background moves (or video).
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  The animated gifs that were everwhere generally were pixel animations rather than video.
  - leeoniya 7y ago
    well sure, when we had little bandwidth to even download a photo.
    - PavlovsCat 7y ago
      Not all animated pixel art was for lack of video, just like not all ascii art was and is for lack of images. Recording a video is a wholly different process to animating a 16x16 smiley. If anything, at least by now, I think more people record video because they can't draw, than people draw because they can't afford the equipment or bandwith for video.
bbanyc 7y ago
There's also the trick where you can redefine the palette for each consecutive frame, and set the "delay" between frames to zero, in order to get more than 256 colors in a single image. This is so horrendously inefficient it should be a crime. But it's still a GIF, and anything that can display animated GIFs can display it too.
- 7y ago