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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 25

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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - egfx 7y ago
    > 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. and that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. If you downscale to a gif you get the graphical effects for free. https://i.imgur.com/8LdcFn5.gif https://i.imgur.com/8LdcFn5.gif
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Downscaling to get a limiting effect 'for free' is not 'high art'. https://twitter.com/cyangmou/status/1254089487870722048 https://twitter.com/cyangmou/status/1254089487870722048 Pixel art is an art form, but you have to deliberately design around the medium. And there are other ways to deliberately design something to fit the gif format. But someone converting a generic animation or video to gif is not gaining anything.
      - egfx 6y ago
        Much of what art is, is serendipity, accident and discovery. If you’re overly deliberate your not creating high art. Anyway I just find it funny that gifs were invented to solve the problem of over sized video and now he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        The format was designed so you could do simple animation in a way that otherwise acts like an image format. For actual video style content, it never saved space. And codecs for video have massively improved over the years, while gif hasn't.
        willis936 6y ago
        Interestingly, a lot has changed in computers in the past 33 years. When gif was made there were no good lossy compression algorithms that had been developed, let alone implemented efficiently enough to run on computers of the day. This changed by the early 90s. >he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs And they have been for the past 25 years.

egfx 7y 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 7y 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.
- egfx 7y ago
  > 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. and that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. If you downscale to a gif you get the graphical effects for free. https://i.imgur.com/8LdcFn5.gif https://i.imgur.com/8LdcFn5.gif
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Downscaling to get a limiting effect 'for free' is not 'high art'. https://twitter.com/cyangmou/status/1254089487870722048 https://twitter.com/cyangmou/status/1254089487870722048 Pixel art is an art form, but you have to deliberately design around the medium. And there are other ways to deliberately design something to fit the gif format. But someone converting a generic animation or video to gif is not gaining anything.
    - egfx 6y ago
      Much of what art is, is serendipity, accident and discovery. If you’re overly deliberate your not creating high art. Anyway I just find it funny that gifs were invented to solve the problem of over sized video and now he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        The format was designed so you could do simple animation in a way that otherwise acts like an image format. For actual video style content, it never saved space. And codecs for video have massively improved over the years, while gif hasn't.
      - willis936 6y ago
        Interestingly, a lot has changed in computers in the past 33 years. When gif was made there were no good lossy compression algorithms that had been developed, let alone implemented efficiently enough to run on computers of the day. This changed by the early 90s. >he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs And they have been for the past 25 years.