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Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

The use of .gif instead of a flash movie or also pretty ingenious (and a bit oldschool!).

I'd say that using Animated GIF is adhering to web standards, using Flash is old school.

How is this a web standard? There really is no standard for video files and if there was, no one is taking gif seriously. There are proposals and half-assed implementations. Hell, not only do gifs look fucking terrible they're also a huge waste of bandwidth.

I'd rather just get served an mp4 file or even an embedded flash object instead of this. The only reason why there are so many gifs in the world is because its easy to find free hosting for them and email. Its still a piss poor format for video.

Not to mention, the gif people tried suing everyone once. Not exactly the paragon of open you think it is. Don't let Steve Jobs' rivalry with Adobe make you fall in love with sub-par formats. He's glad you uncritically parrot his thinking, but its really not doing anything for you.

A screencast is closer to a slideshow than a video. When only 1-5 frames per second are needed, Animated GIF doesn't use much bandwidth. It works in every browser and on very light CPUs.

"the gif people tried suing everyone once"

You mean Unisys, 'the LZW people'. CompuServe were 'the gif people', who didn't try to sue anyone. Anyways, the LZW patents expired in 2004, so that's no reason to avoid Animated GIFs now.

"Don't let Steve Jobs' rivalry with Adobe make you fall in love with sub-par formats. He's glad you uncritically parrot his thinking, but its really not doing anything for you."

Thanks for the ad hominem, but I didn't need Steve Jobs to tell me Flash has problems. As a smartphone user, I had already figured that out on my own. However, Adobe can easily win the argument. All they have to do is make Flash safe and stable, and create a fast and power efficient player for mobile devices. I'm just not going to hold my breath.

Having said that, the OP could've used far fewer frames, and instead of Animated GIF he could've used a series of JPEGs animated with JavaScript.

>Animated GIF doesn't use much bandwidth. I

Bullshit, this is a HUGE file. Its 4 megabytes for whats essentially a few seconds of small extremely low quality video.

Again, mp4 or flash (even with the old flv based codecs) would be one tenth the size.

Again, gif is no web standard. Again, its owners were anything but open. Again, your hatred of flash and other alternatives is making you look foolish.

You are bitching about gif not being open while advocating flash... And telling him that he looks foolish?

Actually I'm advocating mp4, but I'll take flash over gif. Heck, since Flash9, it can play mp4 files.

I'll even take wmv over gif. Gif is not an appropriate container for video. People use it for easy hosting not because its a "standard" or because its good at video. 4 megabytes of this? Please.

I call strawman. You are trying to make this about video, while I'm talking about slideshows. For video, Animated GIF is no good, we're in complete agreement there.

It isn't only the iPhone that doesn't have flash. Many people work on different architectures than x86 or x86_64. Some of us even want to watch these cool little bits. I realize that in your world there is only the PC, the Mac, and the iPhone, but out here in the real world there are many things in between. Standards are good and you're right, gif isn't one of them, but at least it works pretty much across the spectrum.

On Safari, the animation got really slow after the file was saved in Paint. So much so, that I lost interest and closed the tab.

It doesnt get slow, it's just the guy pauses... (typing the filename outside of the frame, so we don't see it)

That's still a slight UX issue. With a video, you could still see the progress bar moving.

Additionally, Safari froze up a bit, which I suppose could have been unrelated.

Preview couldn't handle it either.

The massive GIF was killer on my iPad, but at least I got to see it.

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