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