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>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

>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...).

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...).