4 ms·

Those are pretty heavy unless it's only a second or two (then why would you need a gif at all?) You'll be further cutting your target audience to the extremely

Those are pretty heavy unless it's only a second or two (then why would you need a gif at all?) You'll be further cutting your target audience to the extremely privileged. I've had to suffer with dial-up (3-4 KB/s) until 2009, and with shitty ADSL (15-30 KB/s) until 2013. Many parts of the world are still like that.

kazinator 5y ago
I have a here 90 second .gif I made a year ago (demo of a particular Vim syntax highlighting scheme for a commit message format). It contains 930 frames, 10 fps. The resolution is 1200x768. The .gif is 600.0 kilobytes, so the coding density is about 660 bytes per frame. Someone downloading at 3-4KB/s might find the download annoying; on the other hand, it could play back on a 66 MHz 486 DX they found in the dumpster. Good luck bringing up a modern browser with Javascript. 4KB/s second would be enough to get it to average around 6FPS in the first pass through the animation, if it were being rendered as it is being downloaded.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  You're clearly more careful with resource consumption than many, then. Many times I've had enough time to start coffee while waiting for a .gif to get through its first pass so I can usefully watch it, using rural satellite from Hughes. We're still using your stuff out here.
  - hedora 5y ago
    Hughes is latency-bound, not bandwidth bound. For it to take that long, they’d have to try really hard. For instance, the map could issue an http[s] request per frame.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    Was it a TTY animation with most frames changing very few pixels (like one character cell), often with quiescent periods when nothing changes due to nobody typing? Gifs can do silly things, like store a sequence of full frames.
- com2kid 5y ago
  > it could play back on a 66 MHz 486 DX they found in the dumpster. ooh actually, I got banned from the Ars-Technica forums way back in the day for posting a giant 800x600 animated GIF. It took browsers a few minutes to render! People thought I had crashed their browsers, but they just needed to be patient. ;) I think I had a Duron 700mhz back then, so a 486 would've been turned into toast. (Or, possibly, IE's GIF code was just really bad at that time! :) )

kazinator 5y ago

I have a here 90 second .gif I made a year ago (demo of a particular Vim syntax highlighting scheme for a commit message format). It contains 930 frames, 10 fps. The resolution is 1200x768. The .gif is 600.0 kilobytes, so the coding density is about 660 bytes per frame. Someone downloading at 3-4KB/s might find the download annoying; on the other hand, it could play back on a 66 MHz 486 DX they found in the dumpster. Good luck bringing up a modern browser with Javascript. 4KB/s second would be enough to get it to average around 6FPS in the first pass through the animation, if it were being rendered as it is being downloaded.

JasonFruit 5y ago
You're clearly more careful with resource consumption than many, then. Many times I've had enough time to start coffee while waiting for a .gif to get through its first pass so I can usefully watch it, using rural satellite from Hughes. We're still using your stuff out here.
- hedora 5y ago
  Hughes is latency-bound, not bandwidth bound. For it to take that long, they’d have to try really hard. For instance, the map could issue an http[s] request per frame.
- kazinator 5y ago
  Was it a TTY animation with most frames changing very few pixels (like one character cell), often with quiescent periods when nothing changes due to nobody typing? Gifs can do silly things, like store a sequence of full frames.
com2kid 5y ago
> it could play back on a 66 MHz 486 DX they found in the dumpster. ooh actually, I got banned from the Ars-Technica forums way back in the day for posting a giant 800x600 animated GIF. It took browsers a few minutes to render! People thought I had crashed their browsers, but they just needed to be patient. ;) I think I had a Duron 700mhz back then, so a 486 would've been turned into toast. (Or, possibly, IE's GIF code was just really bad at that time! :) )