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I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save

I already said that before and I'll do it again: it won't work until we make videos act like gifs, which act like images. The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone. I can't drag and drop, right click, long tap. To have anything replacing gif you need THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter for the consumer whose fault it is: encoding, the app, how the file is created. The user uses it, they don't care how it works. They will use whatever have the same behaviour.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
I use a chrome-based browser, but because it's missing some component, probably due to stupid DRM crap, most videos on most sites don't play for me. However, some of them do work. I don't feel like I'm missing much. But GIFs are certainly way more usable than video. I'm also writing web-based forum designed for backwards compatibility with older browsers, so GIFs will always be the default for me.
- wegs 6y ago
  Chrome has insane behavior where it will only autoplay videos from web sites Google trusts. If I put a video on my own web site and domain (muted, autoplay, etc.), it won't autoplay. If I put a gif up, it will. Google claims this doesn't apply to videos with muted, but at least in my Chrome, it does. Muted-by-default makes complete sense to me. I hate it when a web site makes noise. But no autoplay (even muted) is broken. So is having Google act as the arbiter of which web sites get to autoplay (Google's Youtube) and which ones don't (my personal domain). That's a huge conflict-of-interest and hugely anti-competitive behavior right there. It crushes the little guy. Disclaimer: Google claims this is based on some kind of objective metrics.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    Considering the noisy ads on some websites I visit, I believe they're using some other metric. But the metric is bad.
coronadisaster 6y ago
> The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone it does for me with VLC (it is dependent on your player if you save it to your computer) But yeah, I can't right click on a video to save it. Got to use youtube-dl for that... > THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. no sound?
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > no sound? No sound by default depending on user settings would actually be progress in my opinion. But considering half the online video players break in some way as soon as I disable autoplay in the browser I don't think this will be achievable before the end of the century.
dilap 6y ago
Amen, thank you. It's incredibly user-hostile to replace gifs with video.
ddingus 6y ago
Truth. Gifs have just enough capability to be really useful and very hard to replace. I personally hate videos just served up. Not always, just most of the time doing that causes more grief than it adds value.
dguo 6y ago
Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing. They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  Thank for you reply. And of course, you have a good point. If what is important to you is saving space and bandwidth, then serving videos is probably the best solution.
- chaosbutters314 6y ago
  I disagree, the phone/laptop manufacturer will get blamed for bad battery drainage, not the app/website/media. For bandwidth, I'm going to blame my ISP, Chrome, firefox, etc. For the media (gif versus movie), I'm going to blame the website.
  - dguo 6y ago
    As a website operator, I feel a personal responsibility to consider how my choices affect those things, even if my users might incorrectly blame others instead of me.
- ckluis 6y ago
  The irony is a modern gif filetype would be even better. Something that retained the advantages of gifs, but allowed for better compression.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    We don't even need a new file type, we just need browsers to let us use video files like MP4 et al in IMG tags and give us gif-like behavior (muted, autostart, and loop). I mean, I know everybody is really pumped about webGL and shadow DOMs and webcomponents and webASM, but I feel like the basic "html as document language" could use some loving to solve this. This whole mess reminds me of SVG. I get that there are fantastic reasons why SVG has JavaScript and its own DOM and can pull in external resources, but sometimes we don't want a whole new framework for new forms of content, we just want an IMG.
jjcm 6y ago
I think there's a chance this can happen when AV1 starts to gain adoption. Webp had a chance - you can have well encoded, looping video in a .webp container that operates exactly like an image. The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem. AV1 has support from every major player in tech, and .avif images support gif functionality just fine. Until that happens though, I just don't see .gifs ever losing traction. I still need to upload gifs to slack if I want autoplaying/looping behavior without user interaction, I still need to embed .gifs in my confluence pages, and when documenting user interactions in github readmes gifs are still king. FWIW I've made a small user script for encoding gifs in a two pass approach (as most gif encoders I've seen do a pretty shit job). If anyone wants it here's the script: http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh (to use, just type `./gif.sh -s=SIZE -f=FPS input.mp4 output.gif`)
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Yes I think the fact that GitHub doesn't support videos at all shows how far away a gif-free world is.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  AV1 (AVIF) is going to hit the same lack of adoption. Apple is already steaming ahead with HEIF files, while Google is stalling implementing them, and vice versa.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  >The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem It's not just Apple, webp files can't even be opened by Photoshop. You're basically making proprietary Chrome image files if you actually use that format.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    Ehh... Firefox can open them just fine, as can GIMP, as can (apparently) my OS's image thumbnailer. (Though oddly enough not my OS's image viewer.) Support isn't universal, but it's certainly not a proprietary Chrome format.
chaosbutters314 6y ago
I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little crap the user won't care about if it doesn't work as they expect. I end up being the only person saying "If I was the user, I'd expect this. And if I was doing this, I expect this behavior". Instead, they act as if the user has a PhD in cs, and instead, the user for what we are making likely barely graduated high school. software should be developed in terms of the user, not the developer. Not every one knows every windows/linux command and debugging to fix problems.
- egfx 6y ago
  Yeah, this will be part of what holds back A.I. in the future. A.I. software is being built in the mirror of how the developer thinks. It's being made to think and act robotic with error correction instead of being made of mistakes, misunderstandings and abstractions like a real person.
- mydongle 6y ago
  While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.
    - wolrah 6y ago
ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
isn't what gifv is?
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  if you try to save, you get a webm or mp4 video
  - willis936 6y ago
    webm seems like a fine gif replacement. I don't know why Apple is such a little bitch about formats though.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      Doesn't using webm require sigining away their right to ever sue Google for patent infringement?
      - willis936 6y ago
        No. Originally, the webm license required that you couldn’t sue google for patents related to webm. They switched to BSD in 2013. Meanwhile, there have been numerous patent suits against google from other big companies around VP8, VP9, and webm. Google isn’t the bad guy in this story.
        ubercow13 6y ago
        Thanks I didn't know about those developments!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 6y ago
I'd rather take inconvenience instead of insane worldwide bandwidth waste. Whenever I used to see my own gifs stats on imgur I was quite sad.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I use a chrome-based browser, but because it's missing some component, probably due to stupid DRM crap, most videos on most sites don't play for me. However, some of them do work. I don't feel like I'm missing much. But GIFs are certainly way more usable than video. I'm also writing web-based forum designed for backwards compatibility with older browsers, so GIFs will always be the default for me.

wegs 6y ago
Chrome has insane behavior where it will only autoplay videos from web sites Google trusts. If I put a video on my own web site and domain (muted, autoplay, etc.), it won't autoplay. If I put a gif up, it will. Google claims this doesn't apply to videos with muted, but at least in my Chrome, it does. Muted-by-default makes complete sense to me. I hate it when a web site makes noise. But no autoplay (even muted) is broken. So is having Google act as the arbiter of which web sites get to autoplay (Google's Youtube) and which ones don't (my personal domain). That's a huge conflict-of-interest and hugely anti-competitive behavior right there. It crushes the little guy. Disclaimer: Google claims this is based on some kind of objective metrics.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  Considering the noisy ads on some websites I visit, I believe they're using some other metric. But the metric is bad.

coronadisaster 6y ago

> The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone it does for me with VLC (it is dependent on your player if you save it to your computer) But yeah, I can't right click on a video to save it. Got to use youtube-dl for that... > THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE. no sound?

alpaca128 6y ago
> no sound? No sound by default depending on user settings would actually be progress in my opinion. But considering half the online video players break in some way as soon as I disable autoplay in the browser I don't think this will be achievable before the end of the century.

dilap 6y ago

Amen, thank you. It's incredibly user-hostile to replace gifs with video.

ddingus 6y ago

Truth. Gifs have just enough capability to be really useful and very hard to replace. I personally hate videos just served up. Not always, just most of the time doing that causes more grief than it adds value.

dguo 6y ago

Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing. They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.

FalconSensei 6y ago
Thank for you reply. And of course, you have a good point. If what is important to you is saving space and bandwidth, then serving videos is probably the best solution.
chaosbutters314 6y ago
I disagree, the phone/laptop manufacturer will get blamed for bad battery drainage, not the app/website/media. For bandwidth, I'm going to blame my ISP, Chrome, firefox, etc. For the media (gif versus movie), I'm going to blame the website.
- dguo 6y ago
  As a website operator, I feel a personal responsibility to consider how my choices affect those things, even if my users might incorrectly blame others instead of me.
ckluis 6y ago
The irony is a modern gif filetype would be even better. Something that retained the advantages of gifs, but allowed for better compression.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  We don't even need a new file type, we just need browsers to let us use video files like MP4 et al in IMG tags and give us gif-like behavior (muted, autostart, and loop). I mean, I know everybody is really pumped about webGL and shadow DOMs and webcomponents and webASM, but I feel like the basic "html as document language" could use some loving to solve this. This whole mess reminds me of SVG. I get that there are fantastic reasons why SVG has JavaScript and its own DOM and can pull in external resources, but sometimes we don't want a whole new framework for new forms of content, we just want an IMG.

jjcm 6y ago

I think there's a chance this can happen when AV1 starts to gain adoption. Webp had a chance - you can have well encoded, looping video in a .webp container that operates exactly like an image. The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem. AV1 has support from every major player in tech, and .avif images support gif functionality just fine. Until that happens though, I just don't see .gifs ever losing traction. I still need to upload gifs to slack if I want autoplaying/looping behavior without user interaction, I still need to embed .gifs in my confluence pages, and when documenting user interactions in github readmes gifs are still king. FWIW I've made a small user script for encoding gifs in a two pass approach (as most gif encoders I've seen do a pretty shit job). If anyone wants it here's the script: http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh (to use, just type `./gif.sh -s=SIZE -f=FPS input.mp4 output.gif`)

IshKebab 6y ago
Yes I think the fact that GitHub doesn't support videos at all shows how far away a gif-free world is.
londons_explore 6y ago
AV1 (AVIF) is going to hit the same lack of adoption. Apple is already steaming ahead with HEIF files, while Google is stalling implementing them, and vice versa.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
>The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem It's not just Apple, webp files can't even be opened by Photoshop. You're basically making proprietary Chrome image files if you actually use that format.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  Ehh... Firefox can open them just fine, as can GIMP, as can (apparently) my OS's image thumbnailer. (Though oddly enough not my OS's image viewer.) Support isn't universal, but it's certainly not a proprietary Chrome format.

chaosbutters314 6y ago

I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little crap the user won't care about if it doesn't work as they expect. I end up being the only person saying "If I was the user, I'd expect this. And if I was doing this, I expect this behavior". Instead, they act as if the user has a PhD in cs, and instead, the user for what we are making likely barely graduated high school. software should be developed in terms of the user, not the developer. Not every one knows every windows/linux command and debugging to fix problems.

egfx 6y ago
Yeah, this will be part of what holds back A.I. in the future. A.I. software is being built in the mirror of how the developer thinks. It's being made to think and act robotic with error correction instead of being made of mistakes, misunderstandings and abstractions like a real person.
mydongle 6y ago
While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.
  - wolrah 6y ago

ccktlmazeltov 6y ago

isn't what gifv is?

FalconSensei 6y ago
if you try to save, you get a webm or mp4 video
- willis936 6y ago
  webm seems like a fine gif replacement. I don't know why Apple is such a little bitch about formats though.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Doesn't using webm require sigining away their right to ever sue Google for patent infringement?
    - willis936 6y ago
      No. Originally, the webm license required that you couldn’t sue google for patents related to webm. They switched to BSD in 2013. Meanwhile, there have been numerous patent suits against google from other big companies around VP8, VP9, and webm. Google isn’t the bad guy in this story.
      - ubercow13 6y ago
        Thanks I didn't know about those developments!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

agumonkey 6y ago

I'd rather take inconvenience instead of insane worldwide bandwidth waste. Whenever I used to see my own gifs stats on imgur I was quite sad.