Agree. Safari has already made moves for this[1], but Chrome seems to be resistant[2].
[1] https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-th... [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=791658
Re:It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
by mr_toad on Thursday May 09, 2019 @06:34PM
(#19873111)
> IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls.
Why do you hate my phone battery so much?
They don't though. At similar quality and framerate, a video is much smaller than a GIF (so the radios can be shut down faster) and requires less power to playback (because it's offloaded to the hardware acceleration instead of being implemented entirely on the CPU).
Your average smartphone can play 1080p video without breaking a sweat, not so with 1080p gifs. Hell, a laptop will have permanent high-CPU usage on 1080p gifs, as a video it's background noise (https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/43rrf0/pixel_art_gif_a...)
IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls.
VIDEO would be the opposite. For something like a plain JPG or PNG file, it just shows the one frame. Animated GIF files would of course benefit from the controls.
The same should go for unification of the VIDEO and AUDIO tags. Play an audio file as video, and you get a black screen with sound. Play a video file as audio, and you just hear the sound.