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Comment by u124556 | Hacker News Reader

So this is actually making mp4 worse? Talk about innovation.

There are a lot of uses for dumb, audio-free video files. Web forums, for instance. You can allow users to embed them without worrying about 100 different auto-playing videos with sound on your page.

Plenty of ways to implement that and I'm not sure this is the best approach, but it's not just "worse video". More features is worse, not better, a lot of the time. Like when people used to build entire websites in Flash before the iPhone's lack of flash player finally made them stop.

>entire websites in Flash before the iPhone's lack of flash player finally made them stop

I have a setting flipped in Chrome such that I have to click to enable each plugin on a page. This made me realize that the iPhone sadly didn't stop all such website builders (rare as it is to encounter one now.)

I feel especially bad for local restaurants that have sites built all in Flash. When I look up who designed their website, it's proudly hosted on the only local dial-up ISP left in town, designed by a "company" which is really just a high schooler who took a digital media class once.

I know there is no way that site is being redone, and they're now completely at the mercy of Yelp.

100 auto-playing videos will still bring your computer to a screaming halt.

Not as hard as 100 auto-playing gifs will

Only if they're all visible at once. Unlike GIF, which has to do CPU-bound stuff to compute its next frames even if it isn't visible in order to stay synchronized, videos that are scrolled off the screen take effectively zero resources. (Well, they'd take resources to play audio if there were an audio track, but not when they're muted like GIFVs are.) You could have e.g. a Tumblr dashboard loaded with hundreds of screens worth of an infinite scroll of GIFV-containing posts, and your computer would only be worried about the one on the screen at the moment.

Good point, hadn't thought of that. If I'm recalling the differences correctly, GIF will let you layer new frames with transparency directly over old frames basically forever, while video formats have full keyframes at regular intervals that allow you to jump to anywhere in the video by only calculating the chunk since the previous keyframe?

I haven't made any gifs since flashing "Under Construction" signs were a thing on web pages, so it's been a while. Maybe I should put some up on tilde.club.

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