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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

APNG works in both Chrome and Safari, haven't tested in IE/Edge.

h264 might have an advantage since it does consume less cpu due to hardware support though.

You're right, looks like Chrome added it last year, only 9 years after Firefox. h264 is efficient to decode but it's always lossy and gif->h264 conversions have the worst of both worlds qualities of h264 video compression artifacts and being limited to a 256 color palette.

most normal people consuming the content don’t care about it being lossy as PSNR good. That’s the reason why Giphy and others provide an mp4/264 alternate format. Reddit also seems to be embedding mp4/264 instead of gifs.

aPNG was never accepted by the PNG standards body, and tends to be as large or larger than GIF[1]. If we're going to go through the effort of converting, then WebP makes way more sense.

1. https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/05/01/animated-png-format...

If you convert static GIF to static PNG, 99% of the time you'll get a smaller file. That was the original goal of PNG project, and it succeeded: static GIFs disappeared completely. Converting animated GIF to animated PNG leads to similar filesize savings.

Video formats like webp exploit temporal and spatial similarities to get efficiency. Gif/apng do not. This reduces bandwidth costs and file sizes very much.

Download a dozen random GIF cinemagraphs, and try gif2webp and gif2apng on them.

Try ffmpeg or vlc instead, you will get much better results. Ffmpeg has support for almost all video/audio formats ever invented.

It seems to me that WebP is more of a replacement for "animated" JPEG than PNG. http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp5.html in these comparisons apng has the edge. Ideally we could have both. Sadly Apple is not willing to add webp/webm support to safari.

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