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Yes, in ancient history, video codecs sucked, browsers sucked, and the only way to play video was through plugins that sucked. Now, all the browsers are pretty

by lotyrin 12y ago

Yes, in ancient history, video codecs sucked, browsers sucked, and the only way to play video was through plugins that sucked. Now, all the browsers are pretty good at dealing with video, the codecs are hugely improved (although, there's some headaches with IP) and the plugin is dead. Nobody ever actually wanted gifs. They want short, small videos that are guaranteed to work in their browser and that they can be pretty sure aren't going to have sound. We can now deliver that.

roc 12y ago
To be fair: they don't want short, small videos any more than they specifically wanted gifs. They want moving images that load quickly. Which has meant short/small/gifs, because most US bandwidth still sucks. And thanks to the mobile explosion it now means short/small/h264. But I bet that as people become used to 5-10x space savings from h264, they'll quickly respond with videos having 5-10x more data. (larger/longer/higher-res clips)
- ObnoxiousJul 12y ago
  well, it loads quickly because contents are provided according to your user agent and black magic with js pinging your nearest best CDN possible near you and with optimal bandwidth, and then, according to a complex choice in a matrix of supported codec(your SW)/compression(CPU)/bandwidth(the net) a video is chosen through painful trial and errors, where every choices in the matrix (growing at the power of 3 and more) is almost made by humans. The "progress" we could benefits from these new techniques is so complicated and resource greedy and provoking a lock in of customers that I don't think it far outweigh the cost of the poor compression/control of the gif.
pyrocat 12y ago
Except it doesn't work in my browser (latest version of firefox, no adblock or noscript extensions, but that's beside the point). Gifs do. Also I can't right-click-save-as.
freejack 12y ago
In ancient times before plugins, animated gifs or any sort of video, we would painstakingly screen cap individual frames from movie clips and use "push" via CGI to force feed the browser a series of images that gave the illusion of animation. It was just a hi-tech spin on flip cards.

by lotyrin 12y ago

roc 12y ago

To be fair: they don't want short, small videos any more than they specifically wanted gifs. They want moving images that load quickly. Which has meant short/small/gifs, because most US bandwidth still sucks. And thanks to the mobile explosion it now means short/small/h264. But I bet that as people become used to 5-10x space savings from h264, they'll quickly respond with videos having 5-10x more data. (larger/longer/higher-res clips)

ObnoxiousJul 12y ago
well, it loads quickly because contents are provided according to your user agent and black magic with js pinging your nearest best CDN possible near you and with optimal bandwidth, and then, according to a complex choice in a matrix of supported codec(your SW)/compression(CPU)/bandwidth(the net) a video is chosen through painful trial and errors, where every choices in the matrix (growing at the power of 3 and more) is almost made by humans. The "progress" we could benefits from these new techniques is so complicated and resource greedy and provoking a lock in of customers that I don't think it far outweigh the cost of the poor compression/control of the gif.

pyrocat 12y ago

Except it doesn't work in my browser (latest version of firefox, no adblock or noscript extensions, but that's beside the point). Gifs do. Also I can't right-click-save-as.

freejack 12y ago

In ancient times before plugins, animated gifs or any sort of video, we would painstakingly screen cap individual frames from movie clips and use "push" via CGI to force feed the browser a series of images that gave the illusion of animation. It was just a hi-tech spin on flip cards.