There's also the practical matter of network speed. In many common scenarios a 300kb webm can be fully downloaded and playing while a roughly equivalent 5mb gif is paused a few frames in, buffering.
Also video decoding is cheaper because most GPU/SoCs supports hardware decoding.
Re:Is WebP really better than JPEG?
by heavyset_go on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @10:03PM
(#23623109)
This isn't a good assumption to make, many people own cheap phones that lack hardware codecs that can decode videos with modern encodings.
I can't imagine any cheap SoC for smartphones without H.264 HW decoder because playing video is essential and it can record video. Possibly exists for low-feature phones without camera but it's not for web browsing.
Re:Is WebP really better than JPEG?
by heavyset_go on Thursday June 25, 2020 @04:33PM
(#23645357)
The licenses for codecs sometimes cut into the thin margins on budget phones. A large amount of people outside of the US and EU are stuck on low-end phones, and I'm pretty sure many of the government subsidized phones in the US are in the same boat.
Re:Is WebP really better than JPEG?
by t0ughcritic on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @12:54AM
(#23624251)
Do people really use Safari?
Yes, lots of them... on iOS.
Also worth noting that all the alternative browsers on iOS are just reskinned versions of Safari as well.
Re:Is WebP really better than JPEG?
by robin_reala on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @07:16AM
(#23626583)
Somewhere between 25 and 50% globally based on your audience.
That's because WebP focused so strongly on being a GIF equivalent that it also dropped all things that made WebM efficient and instead adopted GIF's awfully inefficient architecture (just dumb frames overlaid on top of each other, without motion vectors or predicted frames).
Safari shows how it can be done: it supports silent MP4/H.264 straight in <img>. You get all the ease of use GIF, order of magnitude smaller file, and hardware acceleration.
It's unintuitive, but well-compressed videos are cheaper to decode than dumb "animation" formats, because file size differences are so massive that it's cheaper to decompress a small amount of complex data than to chew through vast amounts of poorly compressed data.