Many platforms already stopped using gifs, for precisely those reasons. Tumblr silently converts to animated webp when uploading a gif, imgur converts it to mp4, etc.

This is really annoying when trying to share gifs across platforms. I can't export a "gif" (.mp4) from telegram and upload it to Discord and display it like a gif instead of a click-to-play video, even though discord uses .mp4 under the hood as well...

Maybe all it takes for this is a new canonical file extension, i.e. something like .m4g?

The contract for these could be something like "no sound, default playback in a loop, 30 seconds or less; don't render if any of these requirements aren't met" to make sure people don't abuse it for auto-playing videos.

It's really more of a browser issue, a GIF you can just right click and download, but they don't make that option available for videos.

That option does actually exist for "plain" HTML5 <video> tags, as far as I know. It's just that most videos aren't hosted as simple as that, and are effectively stitched together out of multiple MPEG-DASH, HLS etc. fragments – or the site uses a custom video player.

In both cases, the result is a lack of a right-click-to-save option.

<img src="v.mp4"> is a thing, but unfortunately it’s not supported outside Safari. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60114243/using-videos-in...

GIF = Graphics Interchange Format

_speechless at the irony

Creating GIFs for Google Slides is also exactly my main usecase for gifski. Today I played around with different formats for animated images (GIFs, apng, svg) and videos (webm, mp4, ...) in Google Slides. Only GIFs can be directly embedded. Other animated images are not supported, and videos have to be files in Google Drive.

Ironically, GIFs are way larger than e.g. a webm video but are the only format which can be directly embedded in a presentation.

I think Google Slides supports video, the downside is that you need to upload them to Google Drive first

It does - or YouTube. But they will not auto play like a gif and take over the screen when playing.

feature requests for Google:

- inline video that auto plays and loops. This is like 1 line of html. Please do this!

- let me drag a video into the slide and just upload it for me and embed it

- or just convert videos to gifs for me when I drag in!!

One example is Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) - supports GIFs up to 2 MB, but not videos.

GIFs up to 20MB on Reddit on most subs, but videos only on certain subs.

I really wish they could just make HTML support

    <img src="foo.mp4">

and have it behave exactly like all other images in how CSS handles it (with auto loop, no controls). This would solve all the reasons people use GIFs in place of videos.

Like for example

    <img src="foo.mp4" style="width:100%">

should make the image occupy 100% of the width of the parent element and auto-scale the height according to the mp4's aspect ratio. You can't do this with the <video> element without an extremely unintuitive wrapper div.

It should work in Safari https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60114243/using-videos-in...

I wish there was some kind of small, soundless video supporting transparency for emojis, stickers, small animations, diagrams in slide shows, etc, that is guaranteed to autoplay and loop without issues.

The problem with <video> of course is that there's no way to tell if it's going to play an annoying sound, take a long time to load, change the screen brightness due to HDR features, require a weird proprietary codec, need the browser to render video controls, and so on. So they end up getting blocked from autoplay by default.

I suppose APNG or WebP are ideal for this but it is poorly supported, in that very few tools let you export to APNG or WebP --- browsers actually have decent support for this [1] and Discord uses APNG for stickers.

[1] https://caniuse.com/apng

You can convert images/video to APNG at https://ezgif.com/apng-maker or to animated WebP at https://ezgif.com/webp-maker.

Instead of GIF, use APNG or animated WebP, supported in almost all web browsers.