A sufficiently large quantitative change becomes a qualitative one. This is one of those times.
That site completely freezes when opened in Firefox. I can't even select it if I opened it with a middle click, and I need to right click on it and and select close tab to kill it. (Firefox 76.0.1 (64-bit), Windows 10)
I even have the privacy settings set to strict, which usually breaks things.
Lossy compression is necessary for videos. As an example, I recently calculated the entropy of a 24 bpp 1024x768 600 frame avi video (a random frame I chose had 8000 colors). The file was 373 MB, but it contained 170 MB of information (64 bit word size). That is the smallest that lossless compression could make the file. Real gif encoding (including LZ compression) results in a file size of 500 MB. Transcoding the avi to AVC video (Q=20) looks visually comparable and results in a 16 MB file size.
The color of gif is unacceptably bad (8 bit indexed) and the file size is unacceptably large.
That's like saying the character limit of a tweet is unacceptably restrictive or a painting by Picasso is unacceptably blocky. You can use any color in a GIF but you can only use 256 colors at a time. This makes the GIF recognizable as high art. You can point to any GIF and say "That's a GIF!". I suggest you browse https://gifcities.org to see GIF gold. It is impossible to mistake these graphics with video.
If I took a tweet and changed every third word when trying to share it with others, would that be acceptable?
If you can represent 16 million colors in video, then you can make a video that only uses a subset of those 256 colors (exactly what gif does). If you need the high frequency information then you can tune the encoder and still get a filesize that is an order of magnitude smaller than gif.
I do admit that some 90s and 00s internet art is tightly coupled to its medium. There's no reason old art can't be converted to more efficient formats or that new art in an old style can't be made in new mediums. I should have prefaced with a statement that my argument is technical.
and that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. If you downscale to a gif you get the graphical effects for free.
https://twitter.com/cyangmou/status/1254089487870722048
Pixel art is an art form, but you have to deliberately design around the medium. And there are other ways to deliberately design something to fit the gif format. But someone converting a generic animation or video to gif is not gaining anything.
Anyway I just find it funny that gifs were invented to solve the problem of over sized video and now he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs.
>he’s saying that videos are solving the problems of over sized gifs
And they have been for the past 25 years.