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Comment by lousken | Hacker News Reader

are we going back in time? gif should've been gone years ago

Why? Gifs are by far the most efficiency way to playback micro length video. As in it uses the least amount of processing power due to not being encoded and instead just being a series of images.

Indeed - you don't even need to store full frames, sometimes changes are enough. I managed to compress the entirety of the Bad Apple!! video into a 64x32px GIF -taking up 813 KiB.

unefficient*, especially when putting actual video into gif format. most often those gifs are hideous (limited color palette etc) and huge (10+ MB for seconds of video), often either badly optimized (which would only make them look even more crunchy) or not optimized at all. gifs are just straightforwardly worse there (in quality and size). gifs are useful for having some graphics with transparency (if you don't mind crunchy one bit transparency), but there are much better formats (webp/webm, apng, etc) with much better 8-bit transparency too. seriously, people need to give it up and put video in a video format. like h264, which is gonna be widely compatible and likely hardware accelerated. (possibly performing better than huge gifs as well, hw accelerated or not)

I'm talking about cpu efficiency, not storage space. Video encoding is made to reduce storage at the cost of cpu.

But as long as software treats all video formats like a video with the ability to pause and has a seek bar instead of just being an image then there is still a use case for formats like gif. If everything supported apng that would be great, but almost nothing does. Also for some reason every image I save from the net that claims to be an animated webp gets saved as a gif. I'm not sure why that is, but it doesn't seem like it needs to be that way.

h264 was accelerated somewhere around geforce 6 series in 2004

Seriously, they often look terrible due to the limited palette and the file size blows up very quickly unless you severely constrain the dimensions.

I for one, having grown up on 8 bit 1200 baud BBS porn, find error diffusion dithering quite beautiful.

Yoot Tower - Every Movie Theater Clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8o7gg87k4

>This is a montage of all of the theater clips from the PC game Yoot Tower, a sequel to Maxis's SimTower that was developed by the same team. These movies would play when you examined a theater location playing said films.

SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI

>Chill Resolve by Jerry Martin. Space Inventory performed by Don Hopkins with Micropolis.

https://micropolisweb.com/

Generally I agree, but there have been some rare occasions where I needed a gif of a screen recording. In that case, finding a nice way to convert was pretty painful, without using any of those online converters.

I'd use ImageMagick.

or ffmpeg.

But having a nice tool on any (windows) computer where you can just press WIN + Shift + S (or PrtSc?) and record a image/video/gif to paste it straight into another app like a chat is very convenient.

They had to wait until there was consensus on how to pronounce it.

The IEEE GIF Pronunciation Standard took decades to get through committee!

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