Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Gif is a weird one because it's silently been replaced while keeping the name around. Virtually every software using the term "gif" actually uses a h264/vp9 video with no sound.

Modern video formats are so much better that they are a no brainer to use while the word gif just got used to refer to looping video without sound rater than the literal gif image format.

View on HN

The major blunder here is browsers refusing to support silent videos in <img> tags etc. so we end up with all these hacks. Instead we got animated webp that you can't use for progressive enhancement because it doesn't have its own mime type and browsers reported support for image/webp before implementing animation support. And webp is also very limited when it comes to inter-frame compression for no good reason at all.

Gif doesn't mean "no sound" anymore. Gif is more or less "short video", which broke a lot of assumptions at first but we have pretty much passed that transition and it makes sense for what they are used for today.

That ship has sailed.

Gif certainly does mean no sound. Look at discord, telegram or literally any app that says “gif” and it’s no sound video.

Those are messaging/communication apps,sound in those apps can be quite disruptive so that doesn't surprise me at all. It has nothing to do with the original gif, it is just that gif is now synonymous with short clip (with or without sound) and sound in that context is disruptive.

Go to google.com, search for images and select image type gif and you will get mp4s with sound.

Telegram's usage of "GIF" (any short video without sound) is incredibly weird and frequently goes against users' expectations. I wouldn't treat that as definitive.

I ... what? I've never heard anyone conflate the two--not teenagers, non-technical adults, or software people. Most folks know that "GIF" means "moving image that can be easily shared but has no sound and usually crap quality", not a video/audio clip.

Reminds me of when Imgur started trying to push changing gifs over to gifv, which were just mp4 with a strange new file extension. I didn't like their approach but it really was such an improvement on file size and quality.

Not to mention if you for some odd reason wanted to do gif-style animations, you can also do it with apng or webp. You shouldn't, real video format makes more sense, but even if you did there is still no reason to use gif.

Browsers only supported animated gif, not any other animated format

What do you mean? Most browsers support animated jpeg xl, avif, webp and apng just fine.

Perhaps the clue is in the past tense "supported". Nowadays browsers support many formats, but in the "olden days" gif was the only way to get animations in browsers without plugins like Macromedia Flash...

Support was added a decade ago (chrome 59 (2017), firefox 3 (2008)), so you have to go back quite a while.

also, don't forget - actual video format is better for animated stuff. Current default approach is .webm which is standardized .mkv container + vp9 (or av1) video + opus audio (usually no audio to as a feature parity to gif). IMO animated picture formats like .avifs are very backwards and don't add much

One advantage to animated AVIF is that it supports an alpha channel, which AV1 doesn't. But I guess that just points to how short-sighted it was for AV1 to omit alpha channel support.

I am sure that none of the `.gif` files on my computer have been silently replaced.

And there absolutely are cases where a lossless GIF is smaller than a lossy video format.

Precisely. Kind of reminds me of "Hoover" or "Kleenex". Coca cola even. It has brand equity which means it's not going away any time soon.

That's why Elon doesn't like GIF and replacing MP4 instead of GIF for X

> Gif is a weird one because it's silently been replaced while keeping the name around. Virtually every software using the term "gif" actually uses a h264/vp9 video with no sound.

Then, long live the iMessage and Whatsup exploits, because SW developers are not able to do things right.

I began a dispute on the English Wikipedia which revealed that more than a few people use “GIF” to describe, not a file format, but a visual style of looping animation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com