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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

Are there any use cases on the web, beside transparency, where you need an animated gif and you cannot use a video? Videos will always have better quality and compression.

I can think of one, which is avoiding Twitter video compression but that's kind of a weird case.

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Videos used to not play inline on mobile safari, along with a few other restrictions.

When I was working at apple we used a form of this technique for the mobile versions of product pages for that reason - https://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way....

I think the GIF's advantage is it was almost always allowed where only "images" are accepted.

Animated smileys comes to mind, I don't think video can compete with those.

Another one is that gifs are much easier to share, save, and reuse; with gifs, it's right-click and save, with videos... I don't even know where to begin.

right-click and save?

Videos are only hard to save of they are streaming. Short gif-like videos don't need streaming.

Go right-click some stuff on https://www.reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs/ as an example. You'll see all of them say "save video as..." - it's still just that easy, same as a gif. mp4's have already replaced gif's in an awful lot of places. Since they're like 1/40th the size, there was a heck of a lot of motivation to hammer out the kinks to treating audio-less mp4's as more or less equivalent to animated gifs.

When transparency is desirable, there's APNG, which is fairly widely supported but almost entirely unused.

https://caniuse.com/apng

webm has an alpha channel. Just waiting on Apple

H265 also already has support for alpha channel, so no need to wait.

Then you should wait for Google and Mozilla. It's much harder (impossible) due to patent situation.

Checked caniuse which led me to resources on bugtracker. Both have closed the tickets with wontfix. Firefox is focusing on AV1, and not budging on this until the patent situation is no longer a barrier. Chrome's reasoning feels like it relies on old data (these tickets are 5-6 years old), additionally citing firefox will not support it, with further reference to similar performance in other codecs (VP9). Because of the patent, there's zero interest in it's adoption, no matter the cost of implementation

Maybe some ‘smart’ TVs or similar devices that haven’t seen an update in years?

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