3 ms·
AFAIK GIFs for actual video content (rather than small animated (emot)icons) went obsolete in about 1995, when the first RealPlayer video plugin was released.
by BlueTemplar 5y ago
AFAIK GIFs for actual video content (rather than small animated (emot)icons) went obsolete in about 1995, when the first RealPlayer video plugin was released.
Can someone explain to me why people are still using them for that 26 years later, especially now that we have much better formats like webm, mp4, or SVG, and will hopefully have AV1 hardware-supported in a few years ?
- andrewingram 5y agoFrom personal experience, it's because not everywhere I want to share a video inline supports proper video files, but they more-often-than-not support gifs. Github was once such example; but now that they support rendering videos in PRs, I've stopped uploading gifs.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoIt's the only form of video which 1) browsers universally treat as an image file and which automatically, reliably and seamlessly loops and 2) also has wide support outside browsers and user familiarity.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoThe auto-start and auto-loop might or might not be wanted. The main issue is just how freaking inefficiently huge gifs are for this use case : This whole thread, but also I was seeing an order of magnitude difference in a recent use-case I had, compared to mp4, which would have made sending the document by e-mail otherwise not viable. (And imagine still living somewhere where a Mo of data doesn't have a negligible cost of transfer...)
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoI know that GIFs are very inefficient for what they're commonly used for, but your question was why people still use them. The fact they are “images” that are animated and loop is the whole point.