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Comment by mmahemoff | Hacker News Reader

What people call GIFs (however they pronounce it!) are nowadays more likely to be delivered as video files in reality.

It's more of a human-centric label for "short+looping+silent+autoplay video" than a tech-centric file format. A tad ironic given there's no longer a patent issue on the actual format.

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There should just be a video format called "loopies" that just wrap an existing format with these qualities.

Already exists: gifv

https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/208606616-What-is-G...

Nothing on imgur.com's homepage is a gif, for example. Same with gfycat.com.

Yeah, but I can't use the [img] tag to inline a .gifv on a random phpBB-like forum. So I still have to save the unconverted .gif somewhere.

Nothing on imgur's homepage will display without executing javascript. And no webm inside of a .gifv name will run in a loop without javascript. In fact getting it to run the first time requires user interaction or javascript execution too.

A <video> tag can play a webm without needing any javascript, and it has an attribute to enable running in a loop.

minor addition: depends on browser policy, but as far I know videos without audio do indeed autoplay in all major browsers.

I'm pretty sure that's just a name they use internally. The real format is usually webm or sometimes just a regular old mp4 video.

I don't understand why so many people think they're "correcting" me.

First of all, it's external, not internal. There's no such thing as gifv format. It's just <video> with webm and mp4 but silent. That's the whole point. It's the whole reason why I commented and why they felt the need to create "gifv" which doesn't actually exist, lol.

There is no such thing as a gifv file. Imgur just names the file that way when serving standard mp4 videos. Any device capable of playing mp4 files can view them. The whole thing is a marketing ploy.

Yes, but that's kind of the whole point, no?

I have seen that. However, I have found that if you delete the "v" at the end of the URL then you will just get a animated GIF file which you can view with any program that supports animated GIF.

I doubt people will move away from the term GIF. Whatever optimizations we do to the format (short, silent, looping video) will still be referred to as gif. Too late for a name change.

Depends very much in where and via which device you spend your time online and if you’re a creator or consumer.

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