Hacker News Reader

Comment by builderone | Hacker News Reader

GIFs should not be compared to videos, for one GIF is 30 year old technology with obvious limitations, however, there is still demand due to its portability. It also creates better effect if its very short clip, which most GIFs are. I appreciate you checking it out.

View on HN

What platform doesn't have the ability to play an mp4 file? GNU Icecat on a FSF approved distro maybe, but beyond that? The portability advantage of gifs are greatly overstated.

The way I see it, gifs are strictly obsolete. They're big, load slow, and have limited color support (what's the point of a high-resolution gif if you're going to trash all the color data anyway?)

You made all the right points about GIF, it is an outdated technology for sure, but nothing has truly replaced it yet, there is apng as well as other technologies, but that's not universally supported as GIFs are.

In what sense are video files not portable? Any web browser can play them without issues.

I still haven’t figured out the magic codec I can plug into ffmpeg so the self hosted videos on my Wordpress work on all web browsers (i thought h264 would do it but mobile still doesn’t like it) gifs are designed to be portable and work every time

In contrast, if your gif is over 1MB, my mobile browser will not display it. This is done to prevent excess data use. (It's a uBo ruleset) I'm unsure what browsers will still not support h264 however. Most commonly you'd find webmasters using both webm and mp4s in their video sources to allow the benefits of the webm filesize, and the mp4 to support ios devices

Check this out: https://gist.github.com/ingramchen/e2af352bf8b40bb88890fba4f...

I always forget about yuv420p, I'll try it thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com