7 ms·

And to complete the circle, run the gif through Gfycat and check out the mindblowing bandwidth savings: http://gfycat.com/IllustriousHairyGermanpinscher http:/

And to complete the circle, run the gif through Gfycat and check out the mindblowing bandwidth savings: http://gfycat.com/IllustriousHairyGermanpinscher http://gfycat.com/IllustriousHairyGermanpinscher GIF: 1 MB Video: 73k

dublinben 12y ago
Yes please. Let's leave GIF in the 20th Century, where it belongs.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  If only iOS (and Android?) allowed you to play inline videos the way you can on the desktop, and the way they play animated GIF's inline. Besides allowing us to adopt video throughout and save on bandwidth and have better video quality, this will be a huge productivity boost to developers: we can finally stop having the GIF vis JIF pronunciation debate.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    Firefox on Android plays inline videos just fine. Sites like GFYcat work as expected, and loop appropriately.
    - 1ris 12y ago
      "Works" with the android stock browser, however there the controls stay in the way. Same for Chrome. Does not work with opera mobile.
    - barrkel 12y ago
      Much to my annoyance. I desire to disable all autoplay of all inline videos across all browsers on my phone. Quite difficult to achieve.
      - IgorPartola 12y ago
        I think this should definitely be an option. This is a really personal preference and there is no reason you should suffer through autoplay videos if you don't want to. I would want it on, at least for some sites, like Gyfcat and Imgur because otherwise my phone slows down to a crawl, trying to load and render a GIF.
  - acqq 12y ago
    Unless somebody's producing ads, why would he insist on having the video "inline like on the desktop" on the small screen of the mobile phone?
    - jamiesonbecker 12y ago
      live screenshot demos?
    - profmonocle 12y ago
      Because gifs already work that way on phones, and that's how users want it.
      - acqq 12y ago
        I never wanted any movable ads while trying to read something on the phone. Even less the movable the cat gifs. If something is not worth the click, it's certainly not worth to be inline in the text.
    - IgorPartola 12y ago
      To replace GIFs. I don't have a problem with users being able to opt out, etc. But GIF's are still useful, yet a huge drain on resources. If for nothing, I want my cat videos still available inline without having to click them.
      - cardiffspaceman 12y ago
        Hardware video decoders mostly only handle one video at a time and if you could multiplex the one decoder the chip has, to keep up with multiple videos playing at once it just might take a milliwatt or two.
    - derf_ 12y ago
      Yes, what kind of crazy designer would do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531088
- leeoniya 12y ago
  is it possible to have pixel-perfect animations (avoid compression artifacts completely) while using h.264 or VP8 and still get good filesize? also, what about alpha transparency? video formats do not have this. GIF is shitty for video clips, but it's not without uses. it just needs to be replaced by APNG [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
  - sb057 12y ago
    VP9 has lossless encoding support. http://base-n.de/webm/VP9lossless.html http://base-n.de/webm/VP9lossless.html
    - leeoniya 12y ago
      apparently there's also hints of alpha channel, but basically no support for it outside of chrome's experimental flags: http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/07/Alpha-transparency-in-Chrome-video http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/07/Alpha-transparency-in-...
- AlwaysBCoding 12y ago
  AFAIK the Apple Watch doesn't support video of any sort, so if you want to get moving pictures on your watch the gif is the only way. Gif is about to make a comeback if anything.
bithush 12y ago
Indeed. While this is a nice hack, GIF really needs to just die now.
acheron 12y ago
I like to imagine going back in time to 2005-06 and telling myself "You know what's going to come back in a big way? Animated GIFs!" I wouldn't believe myself whatsoever.
- arthurfm 12y ago
  I would like to go back in time to 1993 and make Tim Berners-Lee add video support to the <img> element so that we could do things like this today: <img src="video.mp4" width="800" height="450" volume="0" autoplay loop> If this had happened no one would need to use GIFs. :(
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    Marc Adreessen came up with <img>[1], not TimBL. [1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
    - espadrine 12y ago
      Besides, it's easy today to frown upon the choices made at a time where common image formats included XBM, a plain text subset of C! One day, people will be sad that we didn't anticipate 3d models in <img>. It makes no sense to add support with the current state of technology.
bnegreve 12y ago
> GIF: 1 MB > Video: 73k Yes, but with some loss of quality http://imgur.com/1qkJYEA http://imgur.com/1qkJYEA (not as much as I thought, though)
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  You can, say, nearly double the quality, get a 100kb file or so, and have it be much sharper. The settings he's using are fairly compressed. Generally, you should be able to go down to 1/10th the file size without too much of a quality drop.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
I wish I had NSA-level overview of the internets to see how much bandwidth is wasted on poorly compressed file formats and protocols. Its weird we're talking about gif in the age of h.264 and png. So much for the "burn your gifs" patent protest from a few years ago. Seems to me, social media sites like Facebook and Reddit have revitalized the gif for cheesy animations and memes. Its only fairly recently that hosts like imgur are converting them down to h.264 or webm for massive bandwidth savings. We have an older guy here at work who thinks the alternative to flash is just hosting 20mb to 50mb gifs on our websites. I think people like this are still fairly common because they don't understand how terrible gifs are. Its funny the ways the web doesn't move forward sometimes.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  Imgur, popular on Reddit, actually recognized the problem and invented GIFV (which is HTML-wrapped mp4/webm) http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow easy video embeds.
  - le_lenny_face 12y ago
    I hate the "invention" of Gifv with every ounce of my soul. If it's a Webm or a MP4 file then say so. There are HTML5 tags for them and their looping. The least the Internet needs is a redundant file extension for what has been done by Gfycat and 4chan/8chan for years now.
    - jamiesonbecker 12y ago
      Unfortunately a VERY large chunk of the web still can't see webm. http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm
      - the8472 12y ago
        Doesn't IE use directshow filters for playback? As long as anything like ffdshow or lavfilters is installed it could just use those. Afaik firefox uses system-provided h.264 decoders to support that since they don't want to ship one with firefox.
joosters 12y ago
It is technically possible to do both directions of the GIF<->video conversion on-the-fly at all points of the network. Web servers could deliver/generate video files for clients that request GIFs, transparent proxies and caches could grab the video files and translate back to GIFs for dumb clients, and browser plugins could seamlessly replace GIFs on a page with the video files. In fact, behind the scenes this might be happening now - technically your ISP could be doing this and the 1MB GIF you download has been reconverted from a video file back into a GIF at your local proxy cache!

dublinben 12y ago

Yes please. Let's leave GIF in the 20th Century, where it belongs.

IgorPartola 12y ago
If only iOS (and Android?) allowed you to play inline videos the way you can on the desktop, and the way they play animated GIF's inline. Besides allowing us to adopt video throughout and save on bandwidth and have better video quality, this will be a huge productivity boost to developers: we can finally stop having the GIF vis JIF pronunciation debate.
- dublinben 12y ago
  Firefox on Android plays inline videos just fine. Sites like GFYcat work as expected, and loop appropriately.
  - 1ris 12y ago
    "Works" with the android stock browser, however there the controls stay in the way. Same for Chrome. Does not work with opera mobile.
  - barrkel 12y ago
    Much to my annoyance. I desire to disable all autoplay of all inline videos across all browsers on my phone. Quite difficult to achieve.
    - IgorPartola 12y ago
      I think this should definitely be an option. This is a really personal preference and there is no reason you should suffer through autoplay videos if you don't want to. I would want it on, at least for some sites, like Gyfcat and Imgur because otherwise my phone slows down to a crawl, trying to load and render a GIF.
- acqq 12y ago
  Unless somebody's producing ads, why would he insist on having the video "inline like on the desktop" on the small screen of the mobile phone?
  - jamiesonbecker 12y ago
    live screenshot demos?
  - profmonocle 12y ago
    Because gifs already work that way on phones, and that's how users want it.
    - acqq 12y ago
      I never wanted any movable ads while trying to read something on the phone. Even less the movable the cat gifs. If something is not worth the click, it's certainly not worth to be inline in the text.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    To replace GIFs. I don't have a problem with users being able to opt out, etc. But GIF's are still useful, yet a huge drain on resources. If for nothing, I want my cat videos still available inline without having to click them.
    - cardiffspaceman 12y ago
      Hardware video decoders mostly only handle one video at a time and if you could multiplex the one decoder the chip has, to keep up with multiple videos playing at once it just might take a milliwatt or two.
  - derf_ 12y ago
    Yes, what kind of crazy designer would do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531088
leeoniya 12y ago
is it possible to have pixel-perfect animations (avoid compression artifacts completely) while using h.264 or VP8 and still get good filesize? also, what about alpha transparency? video formats do not have this. GIF is shitty for video clips, but it's not without uses. it just needs to be replaced by APNG [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
- sb057 12y ago
  VP9 has lossless encoding support. http://base-n.de/webm/VP9lossless.html http://base-n.de/webm/VP9lossless.html
  - leeoniya 12y ago
    apparently there's also hints of alpha channel, but basically no support for it outside of chrome's experimental flags: http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/07/Alpha-transparency-in-Chrome-video http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/07/Alpha-transparency-in-...
AlwaysBCoding 12y ago
AFAIK the Apple Watch doesn't support video of any sort, so if you want to get moving pictures on your watch the gif is the only way. Gif is about to make a comeback if anything.

bithush 12y ago

Indeed. While this is a nice hack, GIF really needs to just die now.

acheron 12y ago

I like to imagine going back in time to 2005-06 and telling myself "You know what's going to come back in a big way? Animated GIFs!" I wouldn't believe myself whatsoever.

arthurfm 12y ago
I would like to go back in time to 1993 and make Tim Berners-Lee add video support to the <img> element so that we could do things like this today: <img src="video.mp4" width="800" height="450" volume="0" autoplay loop> If this had happened no one would need to use GIFs. :(
- robin_reala 12y ago
  Marc Adreessen came up with <img>[1], not TimBL. [1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
  - espadrine 12y ago
    Besides, it's easy today to frown upon the choices made at a time where common image formats included XBM, a plain text subset of C! One day, people will be sad that we didn't anticipate 3d models in <img>. It makes no sense to add support with the current state of technology.

bnegreve 12y ago

> GIF: 1 MB > Video: 73k Yes, but with some loss of quality http://imgur.com/1qkJYEA http://imgur.com/1qkJYEA (not as much as I thought, though)

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
You can, say, nearly double the quality, get a 100kb file or so, and have it be much sharper. The settings he's using are fairly compressed. Generally, you should be able to go down to 1/10th the file size without too much of a quality drop.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

I wish I had NSA-level overview of the internets to see how much bandwidth is wasted on poorly compressed file formats and protocols. Its weird we're talking about gif in the age of h.264 and png. So much for the "burn your gifs" patent protest from a few years ago. Seems to me, social media sites like Facebook and Reddit have revitalized the gif for cheesy animations and memes. Its only fairly recently that hosts like imgur are converting them down to h.264 or webm for massive bandwidth savings. We have an older guy here at work who thinks the alternative to flash is just hosting 20mb to 50mb gifs on our websites. I think people like this are still fairly common because they don't understand how terrible gifs are. Its funny the ways the web doesn't move forward sometimes.

imaginenore 12y ago
Imgur, popular on Reddit, actually recognized the problem and invented GIFV (which is HTML-wrapped mp4/webm) http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow easy video embeds.
- le_lenny_face 12y ago
  I hate the "invention" of Gifv with every ounce of my soul. If it's a Webm or a MP4 file then say so. There are HTML5 tags for them and their looping. The least the Internet needs is a redundant file extension for what has been done by Gfycat and 4chan/8chan for years now.
  - jamiesonbecker 12y ago
    Unfortunately a VERY large chunk of the web still can't see webm. http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm
    - the8472 12y ago
      Doesn't IE use directshow filters for playback? As long as anything like ffdshow or lavfilters is installed it could just use those. Afaik firefox uses system-provided h.264 decoders to support that since they don't want to ship one with firefox.

joosters 12y ago

It is technically possible to do both directions of the GIF<->video conversion on-the-fly at all points of the network. Web servers could deliver/generate video files for clients that request GIFs, transparent proxies and caches could grab the video files and translate back to GIFs for dumb clients, and browser plugins could seamlessly replace GIFs on a page with the video files. In fact, behind the scenes this might be happening now - technically your ISP could be doing this and the 1MB GIF you download has been reconverted from a video file back into a GIF at your local proxy cache!