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Comment by jasoncartwright | Hacker News Reader

Since when is 32MB of GIFs on a webpage OK?

Converting GIF to MP4 creates a much better user experience and lowers file size:

  ffmpeg -i input.gif -movflags faststart -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" output.mp4

That makes a basic MPEG-4 video file, you probably want to specify h.264 by adding these switches:

-codec:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 23

Increase "crf" for a smaller file, decrease it for better quality.

FFmpeg defaults to H.264 for .mp4.

Correct. No need to specify.

It's absurd that they embedded long videos as animated GIFs. I wanted to fast-forward to see the failed landing, but the "video", being a GIF, couldn't be skipped ahead.

I wonder why browsers don't give you the ability to control gifs, at least by right clicking -> "show advanced controls" or something like that.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I agree, it would be nice to be able to pause/rewind/fast-forward/speed/slow animated GIFs. I don't want to encourage this abusive use of GIFs, but sometimes I want to control even short animated GIFs, to see individual frames or something. I have a plugin that disables autoplay, and stops animated GIFs from looping endlessly, but it'd be nice to pause and rewind.

Pretty standard on many image boards nowadays. Though usually they would just call it .gif and it really is a mp4 or webm.

Maybe the URL can be replaced with something more decent than techcrunch, like Arstechnica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/spacex-making-rocket...

Most chan-style image boards are honest about the file formats they use, no pretending about webms being gifs.

Take a look at the network tab for your average site with a 'hero' at the top.

Crying can be therapeutic, I am told.

How did it affect you? I just loaded the page on my three year old smartphone, and didn’t even notice the extra bandwidth or CPU usage.

OTH, I'm connecting from a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with metered data. I regret loading that page.

Unlock origin. Go to settings. Look for "Default Behaviour". Under it, you'll find an option to block media larger than any size you choose.

I put 100KB for mine.

Also, you can install the Firefox extension called Video Image Block. It's a real data saver.

Lastly, look up bandwidth hero. Can help compress images on a server before it gets to you. I'm using free heroku tier for mine.

On the plus side, in a couple years you'll have a Starlink 600mbps spot beam all to yourself.

Where are you based exactly? I'm researching time off from Auckland for winter and seems like Nuie, Fiji, New Caledonia, vanuatu, Tonga, Rarotonga got somewhat acceptable rates for work (Raro being worst).

The fact that it has terrible color rendering and it is 20x the size of what would have been a video with proper colors is very much embarrassing.

I'm in an AirBnB in the countryside, it saturated the available bandwidth whilst showing me a bad quality dithered video at around 1FPS

Sounds okay to me. Seems like a minor deal.

It's senseless.

It makes a lot of sense – they wanted to show an animation and most people can load it.

It doesn't make sense, because 1) everybody who can load a gif can load an mp4 too. 2) an mp4 can actually be loaded by more people, because it isn't a senseless waste of bandwidth.

We have different definitions of "make sense". It makes sense why they would embed a GIF, because it is easier to do, more broadly compatible, and well-understood.

It's not surprising someone would trade off bandwidth for this.

I also think MP4 is better, it just makes sense to me why someone would use a GIF.

mp4's can be embedded just as easily as gifs, are compatible with everything under the sun except for obscure RMS-approved FOSS distributions, and are 'understood' as well as anything (whatever that means.)

I can't think of a single rational reason to use a gif rather than an mp4 for something like this. The reason it's done is because some people are old dogs who can't learn new tricks. There is a good reason sites like reddit will transcode user-uploaded gifs to either mp4s or webms (the later of which isn't supported by Safari, but mp4 has no such problem.)

I believe they cannot be embedded as easily as GIFs, especially in a publication's CMS or when posting on a social media site.

If you are writing the raw video tag yourself and all the appropriate attributes, it is still not as easy as an image tag.

If your webmaster wants to use a 32MB gif because he can't be bothered to figure out how to embed an mp4, fire him on the spot. Serving up 32MB of gif to every user who visits the page because you can't figure out the <video> tag is inexcusable. This is very far from rocket science.

Sigh.

Sigh all you want, just don't use gifs. It's an obsolete format with no remaining niche. Your first argument for the use of gifs focused on the experience of users seeing an animation "they wanted to show an animation and most people can load it." If the experience of the users is your concern (and it should be), you should feel obliged to never use a gif for something like this because the users will have an objectively superior experience with mp4's in every respect.

If instead you're screwing the users just to save the webmaster some minor hassle, you should sack the webmaster.

I'm sighing at how much you're overblowing the issue. I agree MP4 is better.

That's like 5 coffees worth of bandwidth in some countries, especially where mobile data is concerned.

It's pretty annoying for people on devices without unlimited data

It's just wasteful.

If i clicked that link on my phone, i would have used up 10% of my data budget for the month.

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