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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

No thanks, my "This Site Under Construction" pixel art would look awful as a video. And last I checked, video didn't even support transparency!

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Transparency is supported now.

https://codepen.io/pbhj/pen/dyPzwEj

Of course this won't work on iOS

TIL!

There's always going to be a case of when using the gif file format is perhaps the best choice for the job. Like all things considered, a limited palette, reasonable canvas size, the use of a transparency bit instead of a channel. You still have a chance to use an animated gif that's smaller than both the webm and webp variants. Because while it still is possible to create a lossless webp file, the codec is completely different and will store data significantly different, and in the certain use cases, can be less effecient

Most video codecs have lossless modes.

How do you create a lossless video from a GIF (or a series of images)? I think I've figured out how to do it for H.264 with ffmpeg, but I don't know how to do it for H.265 or AV1.

The main problem I've been encountering is that everything seems to be based on YUV, which makes it difficult to round-trip RGB data without loss.

x264 has an RGB mode that avoids this but I don't think the resulting files would be playable in any browser

Yeah, that's the best solution I've found for truly lossless conversions, but for wide compatibility the only real choices seem to be animated image formats like GIF or APNG.

I started looking for lossless because my screen captures looked like absolute garbage even at high bit rates, but in retrospect, I bet the problem was the downscaling done by the 4:2:0 chroma profile. It might be that 4:4:4 would fix the awful appearance.

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