Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A lot of people got all excited when sites like YouTube and Vimeo added support for HTML5 video, believing the <video> element was The Future Of Special Sites You Visit To Watch Videos. Given that YouTube still uses Flash exclusively for a whole lot of content, I'm not sure that's going to work out.

On the other hand, I believe the <video> element could be The Animated GIF Killer. GIF compression is terrible especially for video, and I'm sure with some tweaking of compression options you could make a .mp4 video with higher quality and a fraction of the size of the equivalent .gif. If there were some site like Imgur that let you upload some small video fragment, let you do the appropriate timeline snips, and automatically created a nice small .mp4 and a fallback .gif, that would be truly excellent.

Give it a maximum video length of 10 or 20 seconds and pre-load the site with a bunch of the more popular reaction GIFs like the Picard Facepalm and Orson Wells clapping, and you should be good to go.

EDIT: Looks like https://mediacru.sh/ does at least the GIF->MP4 encoding, although it misses imgur's handy "here's how to use this on your site" examples.

> and I'm sure with some tweaking of compression options you could make a .mp4 video with higher quality and a fraction of the size of the equivalent .gif.

No tweaking needed. Test it yourself: Download any of those huge gifs and encode it to h.264 with ffmpeg defaults. With no perceptive quality loss it's immediately 60-90% smaller. And then h.265 comes along soon.

Except part of the reason GIFs are popular is that everything at least sort-of supports them, even Internet Explorer 4.

I expect that will be a common belief long after it ceases to be a true belief. There's still people that avoid PNGs because "they don't work properly in Internet Explorer" but most vaguely web-savvy people wouldn't bat an eyelid at a PNG today. I want the same thing to happen for HTML5 video: the latest version of every major browser supports it, including Internet Explorer, and including mobile browsers; the biggest limitation I can think of is forum software that doesn't yet have <video> on its whitelist, but time (and a bit of targeted complaining) should solve that too.

Vine and its competitors offer this kind of HTML5 video fragments.

And you constantly see posts on reddit where the Vine video was turned into a gif, uploaded to ingur, and shared.

I never understood that. You'd think that reddit users are savvy enough to adopt html5 video. RES could just as readily inline video as they do animated GIFs, and we would all save a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

The advantages of animated GIFs made sense pre-video tag.

It's probably more of a perception thing than anything else. An animated GIF feels like a lot less overhead than a full on video, even if the file itself is smaller as a video.

Also user forums like reddit are a lot more likely to permit images in posts than a video tag, so you get the added portability of being able to post it almost everywhere.

Vine videos only reliably load for me on Chrome. They're almost totally broken on every other browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com