Why do they do this?
It definitely makes sense technically. It should in most cases reduce file size, and also allows you to stream content in buffered so you don't need to wait for the whole thing to load for it to play. (Though I believe streaming in gifs is teeeechnically possible? I feel like I saw a demo one time that made a clock by streaming in gif frames)
The only explanation in the post is "the culture of the GIF now trumps the file format. With Project GIFV, Imgur is reimagining the looping GIF video with all the richness it deserves as a key piece of Internet culture." Is the idea just that people want soundless looping HD video, and they're accustomed to uploading GIFs, so Imgur is going to accommodate them by doing the conversions server-side?
I guess this is an explanation, but it's a surprising one. For instance, it doesn't really fit well with the observation that people uploaded GIFs of content that was obviously native video and not connected to internet GIF culture, e.g., sports videos.
There are still two classes of problems unaffected by this change.
1) As is popular with gifs, there could very well be multiple of these autoplaying videos on the same page, probably even multiple fitting in the same viewport area. If they had sound, these would interfere with eachother.
2) My understanding is that many listen to music from some source unrelated to the webpage containing these autoplaying videos. So even if there's only one video, its autoplaying sound could easily mix with my tunes.
Doing autoplaying sound is hard, but with gaze tracking and knowledge of system sound usage status, I think a pretty good solution is possible.
You cannot easily control the volume until the video starts playing; not even when the video is still loading.
Luckily on newer version of Android there is always an option to quickly access the media volume after you press the volume button once, but it's still unintuitive.
Maybe this one? (Now dead link): http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/utclock.html
It's also possible to live-stream video as a GIF(!):
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/irl/blog/2012-08-20-streaming-video-over-gopher.md
(There was a discussion about this on the gopher-project mailing list in August 2012, but unfortunately GMane is down and I can't provide a link.)
[1]: https://www.linux.com/news/mjpeg-tools [2]: https://sourceforge.net/p/mjpeg/Code/483/
Video require more technical skill and different software people would have to learn (and time in case you need to edit it frame by frame).
What I find nonsensical is that imgur only lets you upload gif which it then converts to video instead of allowing you to upload video directly.
Maximum quality is usually via
Video editor:
VirtualDub
MKVToolNix
(cut a scene and convert to uncompressed video)
GIF editor (they are still around):
Jasc Animation Shop
Ulead Gif Animator
(open uncompressed video and convert to GIF)
And there are a ton of noob-friendly tools that combine the two.
But what changed was that people simply started ripping frames from HD videos, dumping them into gifs and plastering them all over social media.
End result was that the gifs ballooned in size because they now held many more images, and each images was much higher resolution.
What is more wacky is why gifs returned to fashion at all. They were dead for nearly a decade after people stopped doing their own web sites, and used gifs for things like animated "under construction" signs.
Same reason that H.264 won the web video standards war: mobile.
While mobile browsers can now embed videos reliably that wasn't always the case, and if there's one thing mobile users hate it's links opening other apps. GIFs allowed "video" content to be displayed inline easily in a mostly universal fashion.
- A "minimum viable animated thing" tag is more complicated for videos:
<video autoplay loop muted src=video.mp4>