While GIF is surely inferior to short looped videos, it's still ahead in terms of usability/portability: Drag & drop the file to the desktop and re-upload elsewhere (or embed in your own website). AFAIK this experience is unmatched by web video.
That's not what I was referring to. Yes, technically videos are superior, no doubt. The nice thing about GIFs is though that they are treated like images by the browser and the OS. That makes them easier to handle by non-technical users (think imgur, Tumblr, etc.).
I just realised that imgur does not support webm. I thought it does. Thats kind of stupid. For other websites it'd be as simple as adding a mime type to the list of accepted uploads. Unfortunalty you are right, right now webm is still exotic.
WebM is dying – since Microsoft and Apple aren't implementing it, you're basically asking whether it's worth doubling your file storage to support a format available in maybe 60% of browsers versus one supported by 90%:
That's even more compelling when you remember that the only browser which had releases with support for WebM but not H.264 is Firefox and that's been phasing out for awhile: support for H.264 shipped in FF21 on Windows, FF26 on Linux and FF35 on OS X.
Unless you have a lot of Mac users who don't upgrade, it's probably not worth the hassle particularly since WebM doesn't compress as well as H.264. If VP9 ships that story could change if it delivers an advantage over H.265 compelling enough to get Microsoft or Apple to integrate it or the larger video sides to add it to their toolchain. For most places it'd have to be really compelling to be worth nearly doubling their storage costs.
I've seen WebMs on Imgur. When saved and opened to check the encoding some are VPx, while others are h.264 encoded in a WebM container.
I can probably find some links later. As I see no option to upload video directly I'm wondering if it requires an account, or whether it was their new(ish) GIF conversion process (IIRC some look like original videos though).
.mp4 is also well supported by modern operating systems. The only place where there's a problem would be a website which allows you to upload images but not videos.
I'm inclined to say that the enormous compression wins are worth getting the remaining stragglers to upgrade (both of the sites you mentioned already do this, for example, as do other common targets like Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
A large proportion of browsers won't auto-play video, but will auto-play GIFs, so that rules out many uses.
Also, I'd bet that video tags eat memory. A web page with ten animated GIFs might make the user puke, but a web page with ten auto-play videos will likely make the web browser puke :)
No, you're wrong. You have this preconception that videos are obligatorily 300 megabytes or something.
There's virtually no reason for in-hardware decoding of a smaller file to make the browser struggle more than with gifs, which are much less optimized and never in-hardware.
Yes, but the cost is tremendous. First there is the bandwidth. Next it's the hardware: Virtually all mobile Systems-of-a-chip have hardware support for JPEG, PNG, H264, etc decoding. Power-wise animated GIFs are terrible.
