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WebM (despite being closely related to WebP) can be 5-10x more efficient than WebP. That's because WebP focused so strongly on being a GIF equivalent that it a
by pornel 6y ago
WebM (despite being closely related to WebP) can be 5-10x more efficient than WebP.
That's because WebP focused so strongly on being a GIF equivalent that it also dropped all things that made WebM efficient and instead adopted GIF's awfully inefficient architecture (just dumb frames overlaid on top of each other, without motion vectors or predicted frames).
Safari shows how it can be done: it supports silent MP4/H.264 straight in <img>. You get all the ease of use GIF, order of magnitude smaller file, and hardware acceleration.
It's unintuitive, but well-compressed videos are cheaper to decode than dumb "animation" formats, because file size differences are so massive that it's cheaper to decompress a small amount of complex data than to chew through vast amounts of poorly compressed data.
- catalogia 6y agoThere's also the practical matter of network speed. In many common scenarios a 300kb webm can be fully downloaded and playing while a roughly equivalent 5mb gif is paused a few frames in, buffering.
- fomine3 6y agoAlso video decoding is cheaper because most GPU/SoCs supports hardware decoding.
- heavyset_go 6y agoThis isn't a good assumption to make, many people own cheap phones that lack hardware codecs that can decode videos with modern encodings.
- fomine3 6y agoI can't imagine any cheap SoC for smartphones without H.264 HW decoder because playing video is essential and it can record video. Possibly exists for low-feature phones without camera but it's not for web browsing.
- heavyset_go 6y agoThe licenses for codecs sometimes cut into the thin margins on budget phones. A large amount of people outside of the US and EU are stuck on low-end phones, and I'm pretty sure many of the government subsidized phones in the US are in the same boat.
- t0ughcritic 6y agoDo people really use Safari?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- crymer11 6y agoLots of folks using Mobile Safari.
- bartread 6y agoYes, lots of them... on iOS. Also worth noting that all the alternative browsers on iOS are just reskinned versions of Safari as well.
- robin_reala 6y agoSomewhere between 25 and 50% globally based on your audience.