Hacker News Reader

Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8.

Notwithstanding any issues about video codec support in browsers, GIFs will continue to have value until browser-vendors, spec-writers, and webmasters accidentally or deliberately coalesce around a sane ruleset for embedded motion picture completely devoid of audio.

Today, browser-makers have concerns about which videos to autoplay, webmasters' tools for specifying "muted" videos have been unreliable. GIFs completely sidestep that conversation, because GIFs cannot contain audio, and will always autoplay.

View on HN

> AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8.

They have. The "gifs" on reddit or imgur are generally h.264, even if you upload gifs they'll get converted to video files.

TFA's just saying those should be switched to AV1, or an AV1 source should be provided.

I'm not sure they're right though. h.264 will be larger and of lower quality especially at low bitrates, but clients can offload the decoding to hardware whereas with AV1 most or all will be decoding in software.

... and it is a complete mess. They try to to decide which format you want based on your client. Thus if you hotlink an image directly you don't know anymore if it will load or even if the format the next guy will see has sound.

I've linked "images" purely because of the sound and other viewers got a version without it. And many times it just won't load. This is supposed to be simple...

Some sites (looking at you, imgur) are really bad about that.

Doing what this article recommends shouldn't cause those problems, though. The only notable risk is linking a format that mobile can't load.

Often you can just load the same url with .gif on the end and it will work, since they make many formats available with the same base filename.

How is that not a complete dealbreaker though?

I as a user can't possibly be expected to know and deal with whatever the recipient of my link uses.

A magnitude or two of data and worse quality is a small price to pay for something that actually works and still loads in realtime, even on mobile, anyway.

You're right, but I think the purpose of the article is to spread word about AV1 as a comparison with h264 and vp9 through the fun example of GIFs. Most people know that at least h264 should be used for looping movie clips if your service cares about filesize.

I believe that autoplaying videos are allowed in all browsers if no sound channel is included in the video container.

Perhaps audio-free videos should be allowed in <img> tags

I'd support that (as if anyone's asking me...) on three conditions:

1) Maximum duration of, say, 10 s (with mandatory looping)

2) Maximum display size of, say, 25% viewport area

3) Browsers must enforce "Click to stop" on these "video-img" elements even if there are other DOM elements on top.

If none of these conditions apply to gifs, why should they apply to videos in img tags?

Because we can't change the past, but we can improve the future.

Audio-free videos are often allowed to autoplay (though you may need to flag them as muted as well). TFA'a video autoplay just fine in both Safari and Firefox.

I believe that this is the case on Safari, don't know about any other browsers though

Even simple scenarios, like 'show animated preview on mouseover' are borderline impossible to do reliably cross-browser unless you use a GIF. It's really frustrating.

> because GIFs cannot contain audio

They can (publicly) now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19935900

Of course, there's no browser support for the Application Extension, so it requires a Javascript player for now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com