But it's such a travesty that we're in 2024 and still using GIFs in place of videos. I guess it's not necessary on the web directly anymore, but so many other platforms, like Google, support GIFs but not videos. So we're all stuck encoding into an insanely space/cpu inefficient format just to get something animating.
The problem with <video> of course is that there's no way to tell if it's going to play an annoying sound, take a long time to load, change the screen brightness due to HDR features, require a weird proprietary codec, need the browser to render video controls, and so on. So they end up getting blocked from autoplay by default.
I suppose APNG or WebP are ideal for this but it is poorly supported, in that very few tools let you export to APNG or WebP --- browsers actually have decent support for this [1] and Discord uses APNG for stickers.
The contract for these could be something like "no sound, default playback in a loop, 30 seconds or less; don't render if any of these requirements aren't met" to make sure people don't abuse it for auto-playing videos.
In both cases, the result is a lack of a right-click-to-save option.
_speechless at the irony
Ironically, GIFs are way larger than e.g. a webm video but are the only format which can be directly embedded in a presentation.
<img src="foo.mp4">
Like for example
<img src="foo.mp4" style="width:100%">
feature requests for Google:
- inline video that auto plays and loops. This is like 1 line of html. Please do this!
- let me drag a video into the slide and just upload it for me and embed it
- or just convert videos to gifs for me when I drag in!!