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Hold the mic drop. Those that claim videos are superior over GIF's will never understand. The only benefit that a video tag has over a gif is a smaller file siz

by egfx 6y ago

Hold the mic drop. Those that claim videos are superior over GIF's will never understand. The only benefit that a video tag has over a gif is a smaller file size. Animation's and meme's, cinimigraphics and simulations are more than simply video. How about for all other animated graphics? And file size is increasingly becoming less and less of a factor at all. (disclosure: I built https://gif.com.ai https://gif.com.ai)

tasty_freeze 6y ago
As someone who frequently works from a hotspot, where 1GB of data costs $5 - $10 per GB (depending if I load up when it is on sale), smaller file size saves me money, and pages load faster.
ken 6y ago
Not just smaller file size. Drastically smaller file size. I've never been on a network so fast that I couldn't appreciate a 97% savings in bandwidth usage. A sufficiently large quantitative change becomes a qualitative one. This is one of those times.
antigirl 6y ago
The image quality of that mic drop is amazing. I’ve only ever seen that in a compressed gif. Reminds me of when I first seen a retina screen
swebs 6y ago
The biggest advantages of videos to me are the controls. I absolutely hate the fact that I can't pause GIFs and have to deal with them flashing in the corner of the page as I'm trying to read.
goatsi 6y ago
>(disclosure: I built https://gif.com.ai https://gif.com.ai) That site completely freezes when opened in Firefox. I can't even select it if I opened it with a middle click, and I need to right click on it and and select close tab to kill it. (Firefox 76.0.1 (64-bit), Windows 10)
- egfx 6y ago
  Hmm have you visited the site before? Some old settings probably got cached.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  In Firefox Nightly on Windows, my first visit to that site (with video autoplay disabled and uBlock Origin operating, but probably nothing else out of the ordinary) is just utterly broken. Header mostly visible, but breaking apart as you scroll, and no content below the header ever visible.
  - egfx 6y ago
    I'll admit that It's not really that optimized for FireFox (at all) at the moment. It may be because of a browser trick it uses on Firefox to get the bookmarklets to resemble Chrome Extensions. I'll look into Firefox more now that it's relying less on the Chrome Extension and providing more import options browser side. Thanks for the report.
    - ByteJockey 6y ago
      Works just fine on firefox on linux. I even have the privacy settings set to strict, which usually breaks things.
willis936 6y ago
gif is a bad standard. No two ways about it. If you absolutely cannot afford computation because it is 1995 or you know your graphics do not need more than 256 colors, use gif. Lossy compression is necessary for videos. As an example, I recently calculated the entropy of a 24 bpp 1024x768 600 frame avi video (a random frame I chose had 8000 colors). The file was 373 MB, but it contained 170 MB of information (64 bit word size). That is the smallest that lossless compression could make the file. Real gif encoding (including LZ compression) results in a file size of 500 MB. Transcoding the avi to AVC video (Q=20) looks visually comparable and results in a 16 MB file size. The color of gif is unacceptably bad (8 bit indexed) and the file size is unacceptably large.
- egfx 6y ago
  > The color of gif is unacceptably bad (8 bit indexed) That's like saying the character limit of a tweet is unacceptably restrictive or a painting by Picasso is unacceptably blocky. You can use any color in a GIF but you can only use 256 colors at a time. This makes the GIF recognizable as high art. You can point to any GIF and say "That's a GIF!". I suggest you browse https://gifcities.org https://gifcities.org to see GIF gold. It is impossible to mistake these graphics with video.
  - willis936 6y ago
    No. It’s like saying sharing a Picasso painting with transformatively bad compression while not trying to change the art is worse than compression that doesn’t. If I took a tweet and changed every third word when trying to share it with others, would that be acceptable? If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If you need the high frequency information then you can tune the encoder and still get a filesize that is an order of magnitude smaller than gif. I do admit that some 90s and 00s internet art is tightly coupled to its medium. There's no reason old art can't be converted to more efficient formats or that new art in an old style can't be made in new mediums. I should have prefaced with a statement that my argument is technical.
    - 6y ago
Pxtl 6y ago
Honestly, I just want to be able to put a video in an IMG tag and get gif-like semantics.
nelaboras 6y ago
file size is not a problem in big cities of the developed world. Many poorer countries and even remote regions in rich countries are left behind.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Even developed world, people uses metered LTE connection.

by egfx 6y ago

tasty_freeze 6y ago

As someone who frequently works from a hotspot, where 1GB of data costs $5 - $10 per GB (depending if I load up when it is on sale), smaller file size saves me money, and pages load faster.

ken 6y ago

Not just smaller file size. Drastically smaller file size. I've never been on a network so fast that I couldn't appreciate a 97% savings in bandwidth usage. A sufficiently large quantitative change becomes a qualitative one. This is one of those times.

antigirl 6y ago

The image quality of that mic drop is amazing. I’ve only ever seen that in a compressed gif. Reminds me of when I first seen a retina screen

swebs 6y ago

The biggest advantages of videos to me are the controls. I absolutely hate the fact that I can't pause GIFs and have to deal with them flashing in the corner of the page as I'm trying to read.

goatsi 6y ago

>(disclosure: I built https://gif.com.ai https://gif.com.ai) That site completely freezes when opened in Firefox. I can't even select it if I opened it with a middle click, and I need to right click on it and and select close tab to kill it. (Firefox 76.0.1 (64-bit), Windows 10)

egfx 6y ago
Hmm have you visited the site before? Some old settings probably got cached.
chrismorgan 6y ago
In Firefox Nightly on Windows, my first visit to that site (with video autoplay disabled and uBlock Origin operating, but probably nothing else out of the ordinary) is just utterly broken. Header mostly visible, but breaking apart as you scroll, and no content below the header ever visible.
- egfx 6y ago
  I'll admit that It's not really that optimized for FireFox (at all) at the moment. It may be because of a browser trick it uses on Firefox to get the bookmarklets to resemble Chrome Extensions. I'll look into Firefox more now that it's relying less on the Chrome Extension and providing more import options browser side. Thanks for the report.
  - ByteJockey 6y ago
    Works just fine on firefox on linux. I even have the privacy settings set to strict, which usually breaks things.

willis936 6y ago

gif is a bad standard. No two ways about it. If you absolutely cannot afford computation because it is 1995 or you know your graphics do not need more than 256 colors, use gif. Lossy compression is necessary for videos. As an example, I recently calculated the entropy of a 24 bpp 1024x768 600 frame avi video (a random frame I chose had 8000 colors). The file was 373 MB, but it contained 170 MB of information (64 bit word size). That is the smallest that lossless compression could make the file. Real gif encoding (including LZ compression) results in a file size of 500 MB. Transcoding the avi to AVC video (Q=20) looks visually comparable and results in a 16 MB file size. The color of gif is unacceptably bad (8 bit indexed) and the file size is unacceptably large.

egfx 6y ago
> The color of gif is unacceptably bad (8 bit indexed) That's like saying the character limit of a tweet is unacceptably restrictive or a painting by Picasso is unacceptably blocky. You can use any color in a GIF but you can only use 256 colors at a time. This makes the GIF recognizable as high art. You can point to any GIF and say "That's a GIF!". I suggest you browse https://gifcities.org https://gifcities.org to see GIF gold. It is impossible to mistake these graphics with video.
- willis936 6y ago
  No. It’s like saying sharing a Picasso painting with transformatively bad compression while not trying to change the art is worse than compression that doesn’t. If I took a tweet and changed every third word when trying to share it with others, would that be acceptable? If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If you need the high frequency information then you can tune the encoder and still get a filesize that is an order of magnitude smaller than gif. I do admit that some 90s and 00s internet art is tightly coupled to its medium. There's no reason old art can't be converted to more efficient formats or that new art in an old style can't be made in new mediums. I should have prefaced with a statement that my argument is technical.
  - 6y ago

Pxtl 6y ago

Honestly, I just want to be able to put a video in an IMG tag and get gif-like semantics.

nelaboras 6y ago

file size is not a problem in big cities of the developed world. Many poorer countries and even remote regions in rich countries are left behind.

fomine3 6y ago
Even developed world, people uses metered LTE connection.