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I wish I had NSA-level overview of the internets to see how much bandwidth is wasted on poorly compressed file formats and protocols. Its weird we're talking about gif in the age of h.264 and png. So much for the "burn your gifs" patent protest from a few years ago.

Seems to me, social media sites like Facebook and Reddit have revitalized the gif for cheesy animations and memes. Its only fairly recently that hosts like imgur are converting them down to h.264 or webm for massive bandwidth savings.

We have an older guy here at work who thinks the alternative to flash is just hosting 20mb to 50mb gifs on our websites. I think people like this are still fairly common because they don't understand how terrible gifs are. Its funny the ways the web doesn't move forward sometimes.



Imgur, popular on Reddit, actually recognized the problem and invented GIFV (which is HTML-wrapped mp4/webm)

http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/

Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow easy video embeds.


> invented

I think 4chan introduced silent, looping, control-less webms for the same purpose (gif replacements) before imgur.


I hate the "invention" of Gifv with every ounce of my soul. If it's a Webm or a MP4 file then say so. There are HTML5 tags for them and their looping. The least the Internet needs is a redundant file extension for what has been done by Gfycat and 4chan/8chan for years now.


Unfortunately a VERY large chunk of the web still can't see webm. http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm


Doesn't IE use directshow filters for playback? As long as anything like ffdshow or lavfilters is installed it could just use those.

Afaik firefox uses system-provided h.264 decoders to support that since they don't want to ship one with firefox.


Firefox ships their own decoder now, Cisco donated a license of the MPEG patents to Mozilla.


I have been told that's only used for webrtc. playing <video> tags uses ffmpeg on linux or media foundation on windows.


>playing <video> tags uses ffmpeg on linux

If only. It uses that broken pile of abstraction called GStreamer.




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