Burn All GIFs (2000) | Hacker News Reader

Burn All GIFs (2000)

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42 pointspizza37 comments

I was curious what the current status of the patent was and it's expired.

"The United States LZW patent expired on June 20th, 2003.. According to Unisys, the counterpart Canadian patent expires July 7, 2004, the counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expire June 18, 2004, and the Japanese counterpart patents expire June 20, 2004."

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/lpf/Patents/Gif/Gi...

(Pulls spectacles down to tip of nose) Ha, I remember this site. Back in my day we had to make our animated gif's by hand. I remember having a lot of fun photoshopping each frame and using some shareware to stitch it all together into an animation. However, after all that work I was not going to ditch my hand crafted animated gifs. Thankfully Unisys probably realized there was not much money in going after millions of freely created Geocities sites. About the equivalent of the fed trying to chase down every autist posting on 4chan today.

They missed out on all that AIM avatar money. We could have had "Blingee powered by Unisys"

Bored Patent Troll Yacht Club?

With the patents long expired and GIF universally supported by software new and old, avoiding the format today is absurd. GIFs will work many places WEBM doesn't, and support for animated PNGs is dismal. For pixel art or other source material that naturally has a low color depth, GIF can even outperform WEBM in compression.

With a significantly better alternative universally supported by all browsers for years, using GIFs on the web today is absurd. If you do actually want a lossless, auto-playing thing, the last browser to support animated PNGs (Edge) added it 2½ years ago (in the EdgeHTML → Chromium transition; I disqualify IE from being called a browser, BTW), and the fallback behaviour of showing the first frame is… well, commonly preferable, frankly. Animated images are mostly a terrible idea.

(I have absolutely no idea how good APNG support is outside browsers, relative to animated GIF support.)

But you should almost always use a proper video codec anyway, which are generally vastly more bandwidth- and power-efficient. (I freely admit the situation is messed up with video formats, with the only pretty-much-universally-supported codec, H.264, still being patent-encumbered. WebM is almost there now, with Safari for macOS having had it for just over a year on Safari 14.1+ and macOS 11.3+, but there’s still macOS 10.15 for a little longer and maybe Safari on iOS not supporting it (unclear), so you can’t quite go WebM. I will note incidentally that animated WebP is a thing too, and has slightly better support, back to Safari 14/macOS 11 with Safari 14 for iOS working too.)

> Animated images are mostly a terrible idea.

Consider that insisting that a usecase is bad, and you should feel bad works against establishing credibility when offering alternative solutions for that usecase.

It's unkind and a little absurd to tone police by writing a strawman comment that's ruder than the actual one you're replying to.

Your interpretation of my comment is so far from my intent that I must conclude that I have failed to communicate effectively.

"Animated images are mostly a terrible idea" is in the original comment

And where's "you should feel bad" ?

Using video formats for animated icons (think emojis) is an especially bad idea. Have fun loading a page of 50 different h264 instances!

I tried this once for animated video thumbnails in a feed. It was about as awful as you can imagine.

> LZW is used in an obsolete graphic format called GIF

Tell that to all the kids that 22 years later after this article, still use GIFs several times a day in their ubiquitous chatting apps. :)

https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.gif

Most chat apps convert GIFs to video formats like WEBM to save money. https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.webm It also supports higher frame rates and more colors.

Edit: A better comparison is https://c.tenor.com/3eIvVsG3yPYAAAPo/the-universe-tim-and-er... vs https://c.tenor.com/3eIvVsG3yPYAAAAd/the-universe-tim-and-er...

but not drag and drop most notably

I work with GIFs sometimes still on production sites.

I know Webm and other formats might be heavily recommended, but there are a ton of issues currently in the browser ecosystem with videos and autoplay rules (looking at iOS specifically as a major problem causer here...). Those issues can make webm/etc more trouble than they are worth unless you're operating at a really large scale, or you're willing to lose your animations for a decent percentage of users.

There's no autoplay issues on iOS, just make sure it's muted. It's the same rules as on Android.

If an ios device is in low power mode it won't autoplay a muted video but it will display a gif.

That videos might not autoplay is a feature. That I can’t stop GIFs from autoplaying without disabling playing at all is a bug. (One that I don’t expect to ever be fixed, or even widely acknowledged as a bug, but a bug nonetheless.)

While I agree with you, the problem here as a lack of consistency between browsers, which leads to using the least common denominator from 1990s.

Ideally all browsers should have uniform means to control animated graphics (allow or not autoplay, stop all or stop a particular one, etc), and a uniform way to show the intent (autoplay or not, play on hover, etc).

for some reason, chrome network tab says they are both 6.4MB. or is that normal?

It's lame but common for an app to support GIF but not WEBM as input while converting all GIF to WEBM behind the scenes.

Or it's just a GIF:

    $ wget "https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.webm"
    --2022-08-12 09:39:06--  https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.webm
    Resolving c.tenor.com (c.tenor.com)... 142.251.46.225
    Connecting to c.tenor.com (c.tenor.com)|142.251.46.225|:443... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: 6381102 (6.1M) [image/gif]

The first url just returns GIF regardless of the extension given. https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.asdf is also a gif.

The mp4 of it is at https://c.tenor.com/Oc4nf8N08jIAAAPo/mind-blow-galaxy.mp4, and is 12.1 MiB to the HD gif's 17 MiB (https://c.tenor.com/Oc4nf8N08jIAAAAC/mind-blow-galaxy.gif). As you noted, the SD gif is only 6.1 MiB.

There's nothing special about webm, it's just a video format. GIFs are also converted to MP4s.

Even now it’s still the most guaranteed to work on all systems and platforms, even if very space inefficient.

And if you optimize with something like gifsicle, you might be surprised at how small GIFs can wind up being: https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/

The word GIF has actually expanded its meaning. It now (in chatting apps) just means animated picture even though it's not using that file format.

Interesting fact. Burn GIF called for using JPEG as alternative.

And then some years later JPEG patent/payment issues came up. Leading to a short lived Burn JPEG movement too. Next alternate shown was PNG at that time.

Are you sure you recall correctly? The linked page recommends upgrading GIF to PNG, "the only reasonable alternative to paying the Unisys tax on the web is to upgrade graphics from GIF to PNG format", which makes sense because it's a lossless conversion. PNG was a new format back that, without much adoption. JPEG doesn't make sense as a substitute format for GIF, and would greatly increase the size and decrease the quality of files.

PNG support was broken and partial on browsers at that time. People were waiting for PNG but it wasn't ready yet.

Plus this wasn't the only page on burn GIF. This call was on thousands of sites. A viral movement from that time.

I remember the hullabaloo around this patent and using GIFs at the time.

But nothing ever came of it, did it? People just ignored the patent and carried on as normal as far as I can tell.

The patents expired shortly afterward. I figure some lawyers made some money at big companies in the 2-3 year window where they could.

GIF used to be a general purpose image format even for static images. Without the awareness campaign, enterprising devs would probably have extended the gif format to more than 8bpp and we wouldn't use PNG for that today. I'd call that a considerable result.

I don't think there was a lot of immediate action because GIF was already entrenched but I'm guessing a lot of people learned from the situation. It sure made an impression on me.

Ah, a trip down memory lane. I remember seeing that website and after that, I started using only PNG for losless compressed images. Still do to this day; I don't recall saving anything as a GIF.

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