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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Great image quality!

Definitely better a lot than ffmpeg with palette option. (are there other gif tools, how do they compare?)

GIF format may be really dated, but it's really light on resources.

I learned the hard way that playing dozens of small short MP4 video clips on a web page will chock your (mobile) browser, but displaying the same clips as GIF is no problem at all.

Edit: I wrote "dozens of clips", if you don't believe me, try it out yourself, and no video codecs like MP4 are more hardware intensive if your smartphone/tablet graphic card has to render more than a few.

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Be careful, Gif browser performance can often be way worse than webm's, webp's or even mp4s. Sites like for example imgur switched to other formats by default...

And color accuracy seems better with GIF also

Uhh, GIF only supports 256 colors per frame. I'm not sure what you mean. "Accuracy" of color is more affected by monitor calibration than the actual format (ignoring embedded color profiles used by photographers).

I don't know about WebM VP9 but with H264 colors are often in the 16 - 235 range. I can spot in a webpage when it's a video and not a GIF because colors are washed out and can't be as saturated as with GIF

"Washed out" is not a fault of H.264 per se, but video decoders being awful at color management. Most common errors are lack of gamma correction for Rec 709 and assuming that less-than-HD videos are in ill-defined BT 601 color space.

There's also a lesser problem of chroma subsampling destroying fine saturated details. WebM/VP9 supports full-res chroma.

I agree but the fact stay the same : you put a H264 video and a GIF in a webpage, most of the time you get better colors with the GIF.

(H264 also has 444 by the way)

Hmm, I guess our experiences are just different then. Personally I've never noticed much amiss in online videos, aside from low bitrate. Meanwhile, I can tell gifs apart right away because of banding, overt dithering, and generally diminished quality. I also do photography as a hobby so I'd like to think I'd be sensitive to color issues, but it's possible I'm just not looking for it.

What browser are you using? I just tried this with a 0x00 to 0xff linear gradient ( https://www.imagemagick.org/image/gradients/linear_gradient...., duplicated so I have two frames) encoded to MPEG levels (16 to 235) 8-bit h264.

    ffmpeg -r 30 -f image2 -i linear_gradient%02d.png -vcodec libx264 -preset slow -crf 22 -pix_fmt yuv420p -start_number 1 -vframes 2  linear_gradient.mp4

Firefox stretches it to 0x01 to 0xfe, and introduces obvious banding in the process. MPV does the same thing, although it has an optional debanding filter. The black and white levels are only a single unit off from the original, so I doubt I'd notice in real video. The banding is a much bigger problem (solved by 10-bit color spaces), but GIF has more banding in general use.

Yeah I made some more tests with a full RGB color image and a youtube uploading and everything is fine now.

I'm pretty sure there was trouble some time ago though.... (It was with another computer. There's a lot of things that can introduce color shifts : video platform encoding, browser decoding, graphic card drivers / configuration etc.)

Thanks for the comment

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