Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another.
These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.
Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome.
A lot of sites override the right click menu in one way or another, but that's not the browser's fault. A standard video embed is easy to save.
> Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another.
I think that might run in to some practical limitations, both in terms of simple clipboard data limits and the fact that while an image is loaded entirely in to RAM to play a video may not be. If the user does a right-click>copy five seconds in while the video is still loading but has already started playing, what should the browser do? How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie?
Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.
> Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.
Copy is already broken and weird for images, since it doesn't get you the original file. But if you fixed that, I would expect pasting to give me a 'transferring...' window as long as the browser is still open and it can't be fed from cache. That wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. (And being unable to feed from cache wouldn't be unique to video at all. Image downloads already ignore the cache all the time.)
You can’t yet. Thats the point. GIFs are not 100GB 4K movies, yet the current state of the art treats the two the same.
We need a standard method to distinguish an (optionally) looping, soundless “GIF” video from a traditional video, and mimic the behavior of an image in the case of a GIF.
Also GIF videos needs to behave like GIF images consistently across all modern browsers and mobile devices.
Yes, videos lose quality and sound when converted to a gif. They also lose proprietary encoding and all their metadata (including licensing information).
This makes gif's infinitely more transmittable on the web.