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.

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/

Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow easy video embeds.

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.

Unfortunately a VERY large chunk of the web still can't see webm. http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm

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.

Firefox ships their own decoder now, Cisco donated a license of the MPEG patents to Mozilla.

I have been told that's only used for webrtc. playing <video> tags uses ffmpeg on linux or media foundation on windows.

>playing <video> tags uses ffmpeg on linux

If only. It uses that broken pile of abstraction called GStreamer.

> invented

I think 4chan introduced silent, looping, control-less webms for the same purpose (gif replacements) before imgur.

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

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.

Firefox on Android plays inline videos just fine. Sites like GFYcat work as expected, and loop appropriately.

"Works" with the android stock browser, however there the controls stay in the way. Same for Chrome. Does not work with opera mobile.

Much to my annoyance. I desire to disable all autoplay of all inline videos across all browsers on my phone. Quite difficult to achieve.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Yes, what kind of crazy designer would do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531088

Because gifs already work that way on phones, and that's how users want it.

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.

live screenshot demos?

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.

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

VP9 has lossless encoding support.

http://base-n.de/webm/VP9lossless.html

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-...

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

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.

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. :(

Marc Adreessen came up with <img>[1], not TimBL.

[1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...

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.

> GIF: 1 MB

> Video: 73k

Yes, but with some loss of quality http://imgur.com/1qkJYEA

(not as much as I thought, though)

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.

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!