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All I know is that when I find an actual gif it's really easy to save and share, but when I find a "gif" that's actually a video, shit never works right. Keep

All I know is that when I find an actual gif it's really easy to save and share, but when I find a "gif" that's actually a video, shit never works right. Keep gifs. More gifs, even. Down with videos where gifs would do. Also, raw size isn't everything. What's memory use look like during playback? CPU use? Higher? Spikier? I know there's hardware decoding for common codecs but wouldn't be surprised if videos still use more CPU than gif, in practice.

brokenmachine 5y ago
Gifs look like garbage for video though, and take up 10x the space. I'm the opposite. I wish they'd just deprecate gif everywhere and then we'd see better video support. CPU usage shouldn't be an issue for small web video clips on any semi-recent device, my phone records 4k 60fps HEVC HDR10+.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  > Gifs look like garbage for video We're speaking of animated graphics, right ? > my phone records 4k 60fps HEVC HDR10+. Reminds me of the rant of one of the Google camera app devs on a podcast, where they tried to see with the android guys if there was any way to just force kill every other app processes while the camera app if on the foreground to guarantee it would have enough resources upfront to do its job. Now playback efficiency should mostly rely on the codec and wether it's hardware supported, but I wonder if there would be a pipeline effect when you're trying to play 25 videos at the same time and they all need to go through the hardware decoder.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    >We're speaking of animated graphics, right ? Hmm, wouldn't proper video codecs be better in any case? Whatever settings they use for animated cartoons would be good for animated graphics. I can't imagine a modern codec could be less efficient than gif. >Now playback efficiency should mostly rely on the codec and wether it's hardware supported, but I wonder if there would be a pipeline effect when you're trying to play 25 videos at the same time and they all need to go through the hardware decoder. Hopefully it would stop playing them when they're not visible. But you're right, that is a good question as I doubt the decoders have really been designed with that usage in mind, rather to optimize for a single aforementioned high-res video.
    - janekm 5y ago
      Most video codecs, including H.264 and H.265, encode in frequency space (after DCT transform) on a block-by-block basis, discarding high-frequency information (the edges of text and graphical elements are high frequency information). That's why you can see blurriness and ringing around edges in text and graphical images with a video codec. It's not what they are designed for. GIF uses Lempel-Ziv compression, meaning it can encode repeating information efficiently ("the next 10 pixels are the same colour as the last 1"). Efficient if there are a lot of areas of the same colour or repeated patterns. GIF uses RGB colour space just like your screen, so there is no loss of colour information if there are fewer than 255 distinct colours per frame (typical for text & simple screen graphics!). Video codecs (like H.265) typically use YUV420 colour space, meaning that colour information is encoded at lower resolution than brightness. Palette based colour encoding (like GIF uses) is quite efficient when there is a small number of distinct colours in an image / video (like in the videos in the article...).

brokenmachine 5y ago

Gifs look like garbage for video though, and take up 10x the space. I'm the opposite. I wish they'd just deprecate gif everywhere and then we'd see better video support. CPU usage shouldn't be an issue for small web video clips on any semi-recent device, my phone records 4k 60fps HEVC HDR10+.

makeitdouble 5y ago
> Gifs look like garbage for video We're speaking of animated graphics, right ? > my phone records 4k 60fps HEVC HDR10+. Reminds me of the rant of one of the Google camera app devs on a podcast, where they tried to see with the android guys if there was any way to just force kill every other app processes while the camera app if on the foreground to guarantee it would have enough resources upfront to do its job. Now playback efficiency should mostly rely on the codec and wether it's hardware supported, but I wonder if there would be a pipeline effect when you're trying to play 25 videos at the same time and they all need to go through the hardware decoder.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  >We're speaking of animated graphics, right ? Hmm, wouldn't proper video codecs be better in any case? Whatever settings they use for animated cartoons would be good for animated graphics. I can't imagine a modern codec could be less efficient than gif. >Now playback efficiency should mostly rely on the codec and wether it's hardware supported, but I wonder if there would be a pipeline effect when you're trying to play 25 videos at the same time and they all need to go through the hardware decoder. Hopefully it would stop playing them when they're not visible. But you're right, that is a good question as I doubt the decoders have really been designed with that usage in mind, rather to optimize for a single aforementioned high-res video.
  - janekm 5y ago
    Most video codecs, including H.264 and H.265, encode in frequency space (after DCT transform) on a block-by-block basis, discarding high-frequency information (the edges of text and graphical elements are high frequency information). That's why you can see blurriness and ringing around edges in text and graphical images with a video codec. It's not what they are designed for. GIF uses Lempel-Ziv compression, meaning it can encode repeating information efficiently ("the next 10 pixels are the same colour as the last 1"). Efficient if there are a lot of areas of the same colour or repeated patterns. GIF uses RGB colour space just like your screen, so there is no loss of colour information if there are fewer than 255 distinct colours per frame (typical for text & simple screen graphics!). Video codecs (like H.265) typically use YUV420 colour space, meaning that colour information is encoded at lower resolution than brightness. Palette based colour encoding (like GIF uses) is quite efficient when there is a small number of distinct colours in an image / video (like in the videos in the article...).