7 ms·
Since when is 32MB of GIFs on a webpage OK?
by jasoncartwright 7y ago
Since when is 32MB of GIFs on a webpage OK?
- krallja 7y agoHow did it affect you? I just loaded the page on my three year old smartphone, and didn’t even notice the extra bandwidth or CPU usage.
- dmerrick 7y agoIt's pretty annoying for people on devices without unlimited data
- jasoncartwright 7y agoI'm in an AirBnB in the countryside, it saturated the available bandwidth whilst showing me a bad quality dithered video at around 1FPS
- wilg 7y agoSounds okay to me. Seems like a minor deal.
- catalogia 7y agoIt's senseless.
- wilg 7y agoIt makes a lot of sense – they wanted to show an animation and most people can load it.
- catalogia 7y agoIt doesn't make sense, because 1) everybody who can load a gif can load an mp4 too. 2) an mp4 can actually be loaded by more people, because it isn't a senseless waste of bandwidth.
- wilg 7y agoWe have different definitions of "make sense". It makes sense why they would embed a GIF, because it is easier to do, more broadly compatible, and well-understood. It's not surprising someone would trade off bandwidth for this. I also think MP4 is better, it just makes sense to me why someone would use a GIF.
- catalogia 7y agomp4's can be embedded just as easily as gifs, are compatible with everything under the sun except for obscure RMS-approved FOSS distributions, and are 'understood' as well as anything (whatever that means.) I can't think of a single rational reason to use a gif rather than an mp4 for something like this. The reason it's done is because some people are old dogs who can't learn new tricks. There is a good reason sites like reddit will transcode user-uploaded gifs to either mp4s or webms (the later of which isn't supported by Safari, but mp4 has no such problem.)
- wilg 7y agoI believe they cannot be embedded as easily as GIFs, especially in a publication's CMS or when posting on a social media site. If you are writing the raw video tag yourself and all the appropriate attributes, it is still not as easy as an image tag.
- catalogia 7y agoIf your webmaster wants to use a 32MB gif because he can't be bothered to figure out how to embed an mp4, fire him on the spot. Serving up 32MB of gif to every user who visits the page because you can't figure out the <video> tag is inexcusable. This is very far from rocket science.
- wilg 7y agoSigh.
- krastanov 7y agoThe fact that it has terrible color rendering and it is 20x the size of what would have been a video with proper colors is very much embarrassing.
- zamalek 7y agoThat's like 5 coffees worth of bandwidth in some countries, especially where mobile data is concerned.
- kaiwen1 7y agoOTH, I'm connecting from a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with metered data. I regret loading that page.
- vezycash 7y agoUnlock origin. Go to settings. Look for "Default Behaviour". Under it, you'll find an option to block media larger than any size you choose. I put 100KB for mine. Also, you can install the Firefox extension called Video Image Block. It's a real data saver. Lastly, look up bandwidth hero. Can help compress images on a server before it gets to you. I'm using free heroku tier for mine.
- jlmorton 7y agoOn the plus side, in a couple years you'll have a Starlink 600mbps spot beam all to yourself.
- dzhiurgis 7y agoWhere are you based exactly? I'm researching time off from Auckland for winter and seems like Nuie, Fiji, New Caledonia, vanuatu, Tonga, Rarotonga got somewhat acceptable rates for work (Raro being worst).
- Avamander 7y agoIt's just wasteful.
- notatoad 7y agoIf i clicked that link on my phone, i would have used up 10% of my data budget for the month.
- 101404 7y agoPretty standard on many image boards nowadays. Though usually they would just call it .gif and it really is a mp4 or webm.
- close04 7y agoMaybe the URL can be replaced with something more decent than techcrunch, like Arstechnica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/spacex-making-rocket-landings-mundane-with-50th-attempt-monday/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/spacex-making-rocket...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- the8472 7y agoMost chan-style image boards are honest about the file formats they use, no pretending about webms being gifs.
- hinkley 7y agoTake a look at the network tab for your average site with a 'hero' at the top. Crying can be therapeutic, I am told.
- caymanjim 7y agoIt's absurd that they embedded long videos as animated GIFs. I wanted to fast-forward to see the failed landing, but the "video", being a GIF, couldn't be skipped ahead.
- oh_sigh 7y agoI wonder why browsers don't give you the ability to control gifs, at least by right clicking -> "show advanced controls" or something like that.
- caymanjim 7y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. I agree, it would be nice to be able to pause/rewind/fast-forward/speed/slow animated GIFs. I don't want to encourage this abusive use of GIFs, but sometimes I want to control even short animated GIFs, to see individual frames or something. I have a plugin that disables autoplay, and stops animated GIFs from looping endlessly, but it'd be nice to pause and rewind.
- ancorevard 7y agoConverting GIF to MP4 creates a much better user experience and lowers file size: ffmpeg -i input.gif -movflags faststart -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" output.mp4
- LeoPanthera 7y agoThat makes a basic MPEG-4 video file, you probably want to specify h.264 by adding these switches: -codec:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 23 Increase "crf" for a smaller file, decrease it for better quality.
- AnssiH 7y agoFFmpeg defaults to H.264 for .mp4.
- ancorevard 7y agoCorrect. No need to specify.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]