Imgur for example has their own little gifv thingy, that in reality is just a muted video, which auto-plays and loops. Here’s an SO thread if you want to dig more into it. If I understand right, for instance, Linux distributions do not support mp4 out the box, because of the fees. What that means is: although you can freely upload mp4 videos to internet without worrying about royalties, but the companies implementing mp4 to their products need to pay a royalty fee. But, it’s not open source nor royalty free. Unsurprisingly mp4 is the most supported one. Here’s the video formats commonly in use in the web and the browser support: Video format browser support If we’d like to use a video instead of a gifs, the video replacement should more-or-less fill this criteria. "Old tech" does not necessarily equal bad, we still use hammers for example. Videos can act like gifs and have a much effective compression algorithm, videos also don’t need to be fully loaded to start the playback. But gifs were never meant to handle anything else than simple graphics. Gif is an extremely inefficient way to pack video, where as the static gif image is pretty good format for showing graphical shapes with few colors. The technology behind animated gifs is old and clunky, a remnant of the 90s clipart and guestbooks internet. Technologically speaking gifs are in the same club with Macintosh II, Windows 1, and floppy disc. Graphics Interchange Format, invented in the late 80s, still persisting in our daily lives. I originally wrote this post in 2015, but I’ve now (2020) rewritten it.
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