Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole reason gifs started proliferating on the net because people wanted to share short video loops, but didn't want to embed flash or video which may not load or play correctly in a user's browser? And now we are championing the conversion of those gifs back into video? Seems like a strange round-about way of doing things.
I forsee a future where all video clips on the net have been converted back and forth between gif and video so often that they all slowly merge into a single amorphous blob of greyish-brown pixels. Actually, now that I think about it, that would almost certainly be an improvement over the current situation.
I don't think gifs' recent surge in popularity has anything to do with technical issues like browser compatibility. They became popular because of artistic/aesthetic value and web culture. These features all differentiate gifs from 2010-mainstream forms of embedded video like Youtube:
- starts playing automatically
- loops seamlessly
- never has sound
- no logos or buttons like "share" and "embed"
- no scrubber bar on the bottom
- repeated instances of the same gif play back in lockstep
- no frame around it
- pixel-perfect control
All these features make it possible to create art that wouldn't work with embedded video. (Defining art broadly; captioned movie clips are included.) In the past few years, some creative people started making really good gifs that took advantage of these features. Then the trend spread through web culture. The next generation made gifs because "making gifs is what clever artistic people do on the internet".
It's always been easy to create a looped animation format that combines the feature list above with a better compression scheme. Now that gifs are so popular, someone recognized the need and made one.
IMO, the 256-color dithering was more of a necessary evil for most gif creators, although some took advantage of it. It looks nostalgic on 90s Gourard-shaded untextured computer graphics. But for movie clips, etc, I think many will be glad to get rid of it. I bet we'll see a sect of gif creators who think mp4s are not authentic while most people won't care.
Your last comment reminds me of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" (wiki/youtube). Someone repeats that idea with every lossy medium we invent. I've seen jpeg and vhs examples but I can't find the links right now.
I think your list of features is spot on, but I don't think their mainstream popularity had much to do with artistic expression. I'd include one other big feature:
- They are dead simple to save (or link to) and drop into your own page/blog/comment.
and claim that GIFs are just really easy to share and view. They've offered a better experience both for post and viewing a short soundless clip than could be provided by an embedded Youtube player.
How about the fact that there is zero advertising. IMO this is the number one piece of friction for videos (mainly YT) and the users don't want them for especially quick moments (a la Vine).
> They've offered a better experience both for post and viewing a short soundless clip than could be provided by an embedded Youtube player.
I'm not sure that's always true, as there some very noticeable problems with GIFs. Most significantly they're often huge, and must be entirely loaded to play properly, which can result in long delays before they can be viewed (usually with no obvious indication to the viewer) and massive resource usage (besides the problems related to size, animated images also usually don't benefit from the sort of acceleration and optimization that videos do). A page with a bunch of embedded GIFs (not at all uncommon), can completely kill a browser.
[There are other problems, of course, e.g. the complete lack of user control over playback, but the size of GIFs seems to be one of the worst.]
> IMO, the 256-color dithering was more of a necessary evil for most gif creators, although some took advantage of it.
I'm under the impression that the format only specified 256 colors per palette, and that you could use different palettes on a per-frame basis, including frames with 0ms delays between them. and I know some software existed to make this possible, though I don't recall if it made it possible with animation at the same time...
the format permits frames with 0ms delays.
the problem is that there has never ever been a browser that respects the 0ms delay. On the whole, the status quo is that any delay under 10ms gets upgraded to 10ms.
Newer (current) browsers have lowered that to 6ms, and in chrome, 3ms. As yet, there has been no browser that respects the 0ms delay (as in, supposed to display instantaneously, so 2 frames with 0ms delay is supposed to look like 1 frame).
The justification for this is backwards compatibility with incorrectly authored gifs. So .. there you go.
Yes, in ancient history, video codecs sucked, browsers sucked, and the only way to play video was through plugins that sucked.
Now, all the browsers are pretty good at dealing with video, the codecs are hugely improved (although, there's some headaches with IP) and the plugin is dead.
Nobody ever actually wanted gifs. They want short, small videos that are guaranteed to work in their browser and that they can be pretty sure aren't going to have sound. We can now deliver that.
To be fair: they don't want short, small videos any more than they specifically wanted gifs.
They want moving images that load quickly. Which has meant short/small/gifs, because most US bandwidth still sucks. And thanks to the mobile explosion it now means short/small/h264.
But I bet that as people become used to 5-10x space savings from h264, they'll quickly respond with videos having 5-10x more data. (larger/longer/higher-res clips)
In ancient times before plugins, animated gifs or any sort of video, we would painstakingly screen cap individual frames from movie clips and use "push" via CGI to force feed the browser a series of images that gave the illusion of animation. It was just a hi-tech spin on flip cards.
The guy is baiting in his first couple of paragraphs. By the end of the article, he reveals that he approves of Twitter's decision. Indeed, the automatic conversion from GIF to HTML 5 is well underway with sites like gfycat, which is getting integrated into major extensions like RES if it's not there already (RES [finally] merged the code to support this last night). HTML 5 video is greatly superior to GIF; the files are many times smaller and you can pause and/or control the loop, and normal video players are equipped to handle them, which makes platform integration easier (Android's browser famously didn't play GIFs due to memory constraints in the browser's early implementations).
gifs are not necessarily video loops. take for example the works of nicolas sassoon (http://nicolassassoon.com/) which occupy the grey area between video and still image
GIFs don't load or play correctly in my browsers, despite being up to date and running on unreasonably powerful hardware. Animated GIFs are so unbelievably inefficient that they're often unwatchable even on modern computers. I can't count how many times I've clicked a link to a GIF, decide I didn't want to wait five minutes for the thing to fully load, and moved on to the next amusing link.
I forsee a future where all video clips on the net have been converted back and forth between gif and video so often that they all slowly merge into a single amorphous blob of greyish-brown pixels. Actually, now that I think about it, that would almost certainly be an improvement over the current situation.