At this point, killing GIF is a UX problem, not a format problem.<p>I've talked about this before [0], but the big problem for me is that video is just difficult as hell. Compared to a GIF, it is just that much harder to save a video on a phone, and then upload it the same way as an image. Try to save a "GIF" from Twitter or from GIPHY - it's a /huge/ pain.<p>Whatever the GIF killer is will need to pass the right click test - I need to be able to just right click and save it.<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14181158" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14181158</a>
The most important part of GIFs for me is that they behave like images in browsers. They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. You can drag and drop them from a browser to your desktop to save them. You can save an entire page and have all the image files save with it. I've never had this work for webm or other video formats.<p>You could even argue that GIFs not being a video with no video decoding required is a feature. It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU.<p>I don't care about video compression or hardware decoding or whatever until they function the same way as GIFs do.
1995: Compuserve/Unisys is becoming obnoxious!<p>1996: The GIF KILLER is going to be PNG! (We wait for animation. The PNG committee fails to deliver, they had a LZ method not covered by patent, they had the world cheering them on -- and having myself seen some of the listserv emails back then, some of the committee had asshole reasons thinly disguised like someone didn't like blinking banner ads.)<p>2001: The GIF killer is going to be MNG! (Oh now simple animation is too hardz! We're going to dump a kitchen sink of video features into it! Later! The rest of us have given up on the PNG committee) The GIF KILLER is going to be APNG! (Says Mozilla, not too convincingly but they did deliver something)<p>[embarrassing span of time passes]<p>2007: (The world gave up on all that. GIF is still alive)<p>[Interestingly, within this time the only other embed besides GIF that loops smoothly is Flash, and --- surprise -- it is universally hated by the Beautiful People]<p>[embarrassing span of time passes]<p>2016: With stupid player and JS tricks Geniuses loop video files that stutter and jump at the loop point and pretend they're GIFs. We have millions of colors but crappy loop stitches.<p>2019: GIF is still alive! Who'da thunk it. We have crappy 256 dither barf BUT perfect loop stitches! Because extending the simple concept to 16 million colors waaaay back in 1996 was just too advanced for the human race.<p>Let's have a round of applause for the PNG committee.<p>/SARC fuelled by some frustrating web development compromises
It's telling that the author doesn't list all of the file sizes. The GIFs are gigantic but the AV1 files are LARGER than either the H.264 or VP9 versions in every example. If we wanted to replace GIFs you'd want to go with something closer to a comparable level of support and at this scale there's no reason to use a format with no hardware support and limited client support in general:<p><a href="https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4</a> 97.16%<p><a href="https://caniuse.com/#feat=webm" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/#feat=webm</a> 86.39%<p><a href="https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc</a> 16.57%<p><a href="https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1</a> 35%<p>Note also that this is _any_ support at all, including the slow software implementations which boost the VP9 and AV1 numbers but have significant drawbacks if you care about quality, battery life, or the impact on other things running on the same device.
AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8.<p>Notwithstanding any issues about video codec support in browsers, GIFs will continue to have value until browser-vendors, spec-writers, and webmasters accidentally or deliberately coalesce around a sane ruleset for embedded motion picture <i>completely devoid of audio</i>.<p>Today, browser-makers have concerns about which videos to autoplay, webmasters' tools for specifying "muted" videos have been unreliable. GIFs completely sidestep that conversation, because GIFs cannot contain audio, and will always autoplay.
> It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs<p>I thought "everyone" already agreed on this. Video files are smaller and if you choose the right set of codecs for which clients have hardware acceleration then playback consumes less energy, meaning your visitors don't drain the batteries of their devices as fast.<p>> replacing GIFs with video has now been common for a few years<p>Indeed. Which kind of leaves me wondering why author seems to be introducing their article as though it wasn't.<p>Of course, the article <i>does</i> go on to argue for a specific codec. Still, to me it seems to talk in a way as if not using GIF is "controversial".
You can pry my GIFs from my cold dead hands.<p>Aesthetically speaking GIFs have a character that you gotta jump through a lot of hoops to approximate with another format.<p>In addition to that they function everywhere, always autoplay, can't have annoying audio, and support transparency, these are all important features that nothing else on the 'market' can match.<p>I'm aware that there is lossless animated WebP with transparency, and I can encode a low-color animation into one of those for something functionally identical to a GIF, excepting the fact that it won't be supported anywhere except a recent Chrome.
What ever happened to the APNG format? I remember dabbling with it years ago but seems to have never caught on.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG</a>
Hell no, it's not. None of my devices can play HEVC videos filmed with a recent iPhone without severe performance glitches. I fear to imagine how hard it is going to be to play AV1.<p>MP4 AVC feels like a great replacement for animated GIFs and almost every device in use today plays it nicely yet, sadly, most of the websites that would allow inserting a GIF in a post won't allow an MP4 file instead. For some sites you even have to convert an MP4 to GIF before uploading it just to see it converted back to MP4 on their side for serving.<p>Perhaps it could be handy if img tags would just be extended to accept video files (of all the video formats the browser supports) below certain size. Or we should better (perhaps) just forget such a category as an "animated picture" and switch to treating them like regular videos, introducing a separate button to insert such alongside to the "insert picture" button.
AV1 is not enabled by default in Firefox 66 on Linux. You have to flip a switch in about:config to get it to work.<p><pre><code> media.av1.enabled
</code></pre>
For what it's worth, AV1 videos play really slowly on my machine. There's probably a reason AV1 is not enabled by default yet.
This is fine for real world videos crammed into gifs. But please think of animated pixel art, which is antithetical to many the assumptions that DCT-block based codecs make. Doubly so when you consider that most encoders default to 4:2:0 and ignore transparency.<p>APNG or similar image formats are better for this purpose
The code shows the first three video formats being available and prioritized before gif, but the sample videos do not include gifs. It'd be nice to see the quality difference between the format that is being discouraged and the format being encouraged.<p>Personally, I love gifs. They work with no fuss.
You can blame both Google and Mozilla for ruining the chance to replace GIFs with APNG and WebP respectively. People were waiting the support of those for years in Chrome/Firefox, but their stubbornness already forced some image hosting sites to use video formats like WebM. At this point I am not sure WebP or APNG would become popular. But using proper image format for animation is a better solution , I think.
The test results in this blog do not function correctly on iOS latest, so while I endorse this as a general future goal, make sure you have a proper fallback solution in place if iPhone users are relevant to you.
Just a parenthetical note:<p>The article, in its ffmpeg encoding guide says,<p><pre><code> -f - Only used in the first pass. Specifies the format of the output file in the second pass i.e. MP4 in this case
</code></pre>
This is not required to be the same as the intended output format. Using `-f null -` will work just as well, as long as the encoder is epxressly set, which it is, in the commands shown.
The VP9 and AV1 aren't loading in my browser, (latest Safari on Mojave 10.14.4).<p>I understand pushing for progress, but with this table, I'm not sure "it's time" just yet.<p><a href="https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1</a>
Well let's get one thing straight, VP9 does not achieve 50% more compression compared to H.264... Second the demo videos were cherry picked to support their argument - using full motion panning...
As an app developer, whenever I need something animated, I use the baseline MP4 format. My main motivation was that animated GIFs were not supported by Android without third party libraries.<p>I've had 10-15 seconds of videos (640x480) at 10 fps well under 200 KB. I also compared JPEG with MP4 and decided to use MP4 video (1 frame) instead of JPEG to keep myself from re-implementing a UI again for an image.
Wake me up when the AVI encoder's performance can be measured by Frames Per Second. Currently, it should better be counted by Frames Per Day. Decoder is also slow. We need a high end desktop computer for real-time decoding of AV1 video.<p>There is no phone/tablet that can afford such performance.
My browser (FF66 Win10) lags and hangs when browsing this site. Also, the AV1 videos have frozen and I can't get them to play again without refreshing. I can recreate both of these bugs by simply changing tabs. Despite that, I'm ready to switch to video too.
I think it really comes down to use case.<p>If your intent is to display content that is originally video, then you should use the best and most supported video format.<p>If your intent is to display some effect through animation, a gif isnt a bad thing.<p>For example, the ajax loader that we are all familiar with? The size difference is minor. The gif is 16k, an mp4 is 11k. HOWEVER, with the video I have worry about the browser playing it, looping it, and does it handle transparency? (i dunno)<p>If I wanted one of those full page & full motion backgrounds, it would definitely be a video. The first time I saw a page like that load, load really fast, and be high quality video, I was amazed (leave aside aesthetics)
This is the one time I am very happy that standards have failed to materialise. Leave me to read in peace with distraction free web pages thank you very much. If I want to see an animation I’m fine with touch or a click for activation.
Okay, I'm on board. But what container am I meant to be using for my AV1 content? I see the value of a limited subset of mkv, e.g. webm, but webm is <i>too</i> limited in my opinion. It has no facilities for soft subtitles for instance. How is that an acceptable state of affairs? That's an accessibility issue.<p>And yes, I know websites can send subtitles separately then render the subtitles over the <video> element, but that's no excuse for an ostensibly modern media container to not support subtitle tracks.
The limitations of GIFs are part of what makes them great. The constraints sort of lend themselves to forcing a little extra creativity. Finding that perfect loop, finding that great moment that so perfectly works out of context, spoofing text that fits the scene/mood to repurpose those frames for a niche community - it's just fun to make and share GIFs. The problem with video is its a video.
I predict that users will go on calling AV1 video (or any other formats we use in the future) “gif”s anyway.<p>The word “gif” will come to mean “animated image”.
I'd love to AV1 to become the standard, but as far as I've seen, it's just not implemented anywhere, and the spec wasn't 100% final. I was messing with ffmpeg a couple months ago, and it didn't look like a straightforward option to convert either. I'd say it's not quite time we replace GIFs with it.
While investigating if I could actually use this—animated PNG, I found this website and it convinced me it is the new direction I should take: <a href="http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp.html" rel="nofollow">http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp.html</a>
Animated PNG seems to be the least-bad option that covers every key GIF feature, and most importantly will be supported by every major browser once Edge-Chromium ships: <a href="https://www.caniuse.com/#feat=apng" rel="nofollow">https://www.caniuse.com/#feat=apng</a>
Nobody mentioned so I'll add: the one thing holding me back is the current ability to insert autoplaying gifs into GitHub's markdown.<p>No <video> type formats are supported and being able to add an animated gif showing what you're creating a pull request for is immensely useful.
In order to truly have a shot at replacing gifs, it has to be as frictionless to use as gifs are. That means being able to refer to it with a single, simply tag.<p><video src="example.av1"><p>and, in addition, for as many people as possible to support opening of av1s as they do with gifs.
I don't think it can be killed unless (unordered)<p>- looping is solved and convenient to configure<p>- it can be cross media barriers (copied into a text, copied into an e-mail, etc.)<p>- it pleases the bandwidth gods (are gifs usually smaller? i know that they have a limited color palette)
<i>GIFs take up a massive amount of space (often multiple megabytes!) and if you’re a web developer, then that’s completely against your ethos!</i><p>Judging by most websites I comes across, this must be referring to some other universe.
Fine, but do it transparently so the file is named .gif and it behaves the same as a gif only better optimized.<p>I hate opening “gifs” that are actually videos and, for example, interrupt my currently playing music to playback silence.
The "We need a gif replacement" discussion isn't quite in xkcd 927 territory yet, but its very close.<p>And that is what is working against something completely replacing it.<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927/</a>
GIFs are still here because people make art with it, in some form. This is how we got still GIFs around, not because we needed to transfer videos. The idea of replacing everything based on technical superiority is extremely shortsighted. We need more humanists in computing.