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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

I really loathe GIF for screen recordings: they are huge, they look terrible due to the 8-bit color pallet and low frame rate (in a desperate attempt to make them less huge), encoding is slow (in my experience at least, probably no hwenc available?) and they are expensive to render. There’s hardly any reason to use GIF when you can use a video instead — Imgur did exactly that with their GIFV which is just an H.264 video IIRC.

Unfortunately there are still many places where only images are allowed (e,g, GitHub README). HEIF is supposed to solve this problem but support is apparently abysmal.[1]

Anyone aware of any progress on a replacement of GIF?

[1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=heif

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I find this particularly annoying. Back in the early 2000s I wrote some small app to generate static webpages for photo collections to be put on CD because OSes couldn't browse jpgs natively but browsers could. Now the problem has gone the other way, my iPhone and Android save HEIF but I can't use those on the web. I have to first go through a manual conversion process. It's like my computers have regressed 20 years.

GIFs are the new VHS - bad quality, bulky, slow - but truly ubiquitous.

... and maybe a certain charm. My VHS collection implies there must be some charm to VHS - and a grainy meme clip with 100% guarantee of no sound has a certain charm too.

In context, gifs have a killer feature over videos in most environments: they auto-play and loop. From twitter to Slack to slides, gifs “just work” in a way that videos are constantly face-planting.

I use .webm files all the time as stand-ins for GIF, and more and more sites/apps have support for inline playback nowadays.

You can strip the audio out completely from those files, and have like 20 second recordings that map out to ~1-2MB vs +10MB for GIF. All in all, it's pretty great.

Additionally you can encode webm within the browser, although it feels a bit dirty to do so: https://github.com/antimatter15/whammy

In theory h264 or WebM should be a decent alternative already. You can also get larger color palettes in GIF by exploiting the ability of frames to have their own palettes and layer on top of eachother.

GitHub issues supports animated webp FYI so I guess README does too.

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