I recall reading on gfycat's subreddit that desktop Chrome's H264 support is occasionally spotty, so they chose to force on VP8/WebM in Chrome. The upside is t

I recall reading on gfycat's subreddit that desktop Chrome's H264 support is occasionally spotty, so they chose to force on VP8/WebM in Chrome. The upside is that users get a reliable experience. the downside is that laptop Chrome users get a reliably lower battery life, as VP8 isn't typically hardware accelerated.