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I wonder what the pain point that is stopping the wider public from switching to a real video format for those short clips is. Given that real video codecs have

I wonder what the pain point that is stopping the wider public from switching to a real video format for those short clips is. Given that real video codecs have much better compression at comparable quality, is it just the lack of simple tiny video hosting options comparable to imgur? <video> tags being harder to use on random posting platforms than <img tags>? Chroma subsampling "blurring" clips with sharp edges like from cartoons or 2d videogames? Something less obvious?

csense 14y ago
An <img> tag pointing to animated gif should work on every combination of image host + CMS + browser. I'm not sure off the top of my head what HTML 5 market share is like (anyone with recent data want to chime in?), but I'm guessing lots of people are running browsers that still don't have <video> capability.
- drchaos 14y ago
  http://caniuse.com/#search=video http://caniuse.com/#search=video The percentage of users not able to use <video> is roughly equivalent to the percentage of users running IE8, which is about 20% right now, and probably will stay there in the near future, as XP users cannot upgrade to IE9 (thanks, MS!). The other problem with <video> is that there is still no common format which every browser supports, so even if you would ignore IE8 (or provide a fallback via Flash) you'd still have to encode all videos twice (to H.264 and WebM/VP8). Sad as it is, but Flash for video and animated GIF will stay with us for some years.