Not for screen recordings, unless you're doing a screen recording of photos or videos a GIF will typically be more bandwidth efficient (as there will be large areas of single colours and few changes between frames which GIF is good at).
Pretty sure that's how modern video codecs work too. A lot of movies have regions that don't change much between frames (e.g. backgrounds, or some dude's face staring at the camera all dramatically).
What GIF gets you is a lossless video, which is overkill for most applications. Video codecs can achieve a similar perceptual quality at a tiny fraction of the size, which is why services like gyfcat and imgur will often auto-convert gifs to videos for browsers that support it.
Take this 2MB GIF (https://blackmagic.so/assets/sidebar/most-engaging-hours.gif) and put it through an online converter: https://ezgif.com/gif-to-mp4/ezgif-7-68b177ec1944.gif
WebP: 1.64 MB
MP4: 300 kB
AVIF: 274 kB
The original GIF can actually be compressed losslessly down to just 1.4MB with a better compressor like https://gifcompressor.com .
MP4 (and similar codecs) are not typically very good at compressing regions of constant colour, while GIF is very good at that. However I have to admit that the output of that converter is acceptable in MP4, better than I would have expected (though noticeably worse quality).
BTW curiously (likely to better performance on regions of constant colour) the non-lossy WebP does better on this example coming in at just 1.2MB!
If you really want to use GIF, it would make more sense to manually create an animation out of frames you define, switching between highlights of that feature, rather than a screen recording that captures every minor, irrelevant animation and follows the hover popup as it moves around a few pixels. That's just a waste of bandwidth. A manually curated GIF of that size could be like 40 kB or so, not megabytes.
Otherwise, I'd argue MP4 is by far the superior option for this use case given its far smaller size, where visitors just need to know at a rough glance what a feature does, not examine it for pixel perfection. An imperfect video that loads in 20% of the time is preferable than waiting forever for a huge gif to load.
I'd consider that a good trade-off given the universal compatibility of GIFs, and no ringing in the decoded video.
Keep gifs. More gifs, even. Down with videos where gifs would do.
Also, raw size isn't everything. What's memory use look like during playback? CPU use? Higher? Spikier? I know there's hardware decoding for common codecs but wouldn't be surprised if videos still use more CPU than gif, in practice.
I'm the opposite. I wish they'd just deprecate gif everywhere and then we'd see better video support.
CPU usage shouldn't be an issue for small web video clips on any semi-recent device, my phone records 4k 60fps HEVC HDR10+.
We're speaking of animated graphics, right ?
> my phone records 4k 60fps HEVC HDR10+.
Reminds me of the rant of one of the Google camera app devs on a podcast, where they tried to see with the android guys if there was any way to just force kill every other app processes while the camera app if on the foreground to guarantee it would have enough resources upfront to do its job.
Now playback efficiency should mostly rely on the codec and wether it's hardware supported, but I wonder if there would be a pipeline effect when you're trying to play 25 videos at the same time and they all need to go through the hardware decoder.
Hmm, wouldn't proper video codecs be better in any case?
Whatever settings they use for animated cartoons would be good for animated graphics. I can't imagine a modern codec could be less efficient than gif.
>Now playback efficiency should mostly rely on the codec and wether it's hardware supported, but I wonder if there would be a pipeline effect when you're trying to play 25 videos at the same time and they all need to go through the hardware decoder.
Hopefully it would stop playing them when they're not visible. But you're right, that is a good question as I doubt the decoders have really been designed with that usage in mind, rather to optimize for a single aforementioned high-res video.
GIF uses Lempel-Ziv compression, meaning it can encode repeating information efficiently ("the next 10 pixels are the same colour as the last 1"). Efficient if there are a lot of areas of the same colour or repeated patterns.
GIF uses RGB colour space just like your screen, so there is no loss of colour information if there are fewer than 255 distinct colours per frame (typical for text & simple screen graphics!). Video codecs (like H.265) typically use YUV420 colour space, meaning that colour information is encoded at lower resolution than brightness.
Palette based colour encoding (like GIF uses) is quite efficient when there is a small number of distinct colours in an image / video (like in the videos in the article...).