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The one of many problems with gifs is that you can't pause or rewind them.

That problem could easily be solved by browsers though? Treat an animated gif like an mp4

Or just skip the GIF and create an MP4 file? No need to try and shoehorn GIF into what MP4 can do perfectly well.

Yes... except that you can't embed a video in github README

mpv has builtin support for gifs via ffmpeg.