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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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As opposed to what widely supported animated image format?
APNG, WebP, AVIF, WebM. Not sure about JpegXL
GIF is size and ressource heavy
Of all the formats you mentioned these are supported on popular platforms:
That's why gifs are still a thing.
This is circular reasoning. They are wondering why gif is still a thing precisely because it's so supported while other formats that are better aren't and you are answering that it is because it's supported while other formats aren't.
In that case the only people that can answer the question are the engineers from those platforms.
Because it's old and easy to handle. Yes it's wasteful if you convert whole videos, but really anything under 10s with low rez is easily handleable by pretty much anything. Gif was the first animated format and that's why it's big. Also early internet forum days were absolutely plastered with pixelart gifs that ran for minutes and barely swalloed 100kb. You can get a lot of bang for your buck if you save on pixels and framerate. But ofc a 60fps render of some 4k bluray clip will eat your memory. Contrast that with 16×32 px gif that runs at 8fps.
GIF is big because it uses dictionary compression (pixel colors are mapped to a lookup table and then combinations of bits of increasing length are assigned to each table entry, the shortest combinations going for the most used colors, the longuest for the least used ones) which is great for stuff with clear (not-aliased) lines, a limited number of colors and large areas with just one flat color (such as drawings) but really bad for actual pictures (anything real world or imitating it, with natural shading).
I believe GIF still beats all or most other formats (except, for larger images, the actual vector graphics formats used in the programs with which such drawings are made nowadays) for things like drawings. (That said, I think PNG has a mode that does the same kind of compression, used for stuff like the little lemmy icon next to our nicknames here)
Animation on top if it was a bit of a hack due to the header format allowing multiple images in the same file, so it's really just a slideshow that has no video-oriented compression (i.e. each image is compressed individually and stored whole even if it's pretty much the last image with but a handful of pixels changed), hence why it's big when used for animation.
The kind of compression used in stuff like JPEG is based on the frequency of how each color channel changes across a block of pixels - which was 8x8 in the original JPEG - (i.e. it tries to match each block in the image to a sum of waves of different frequencies) which is much better for natural images, but loses information as a perfect match is usually impossible, and video compression methods have all sorts of intermediate frame compression techniques, the most basic of which is "this frame is the last frame with block such and such intact or moved around X pixels plus here's a bunch of entirelly new pixels" which usually is a lot better than compressing each image individually and storing it, not taking in account previous or subsequent images.
PS: I learned this stuff back at Uni, almost 3 decades ago, which shows you just how old this stuff is.
It's called an industry standard. We're using the same bolting in mechanic for ages. Only in computer science do things have to change every year...
mp4? Imgur doesn't even bother hosting gifs—it automatically converts any you upload to mp4 because gifs are incredibly storage-inefficient.
mp4 is a video format, the key differences with animated images being autoplay, looping and maybe transparency.
The point is the browser just plays the mp4 with autoplay and looping and then people call them GIFs when they aren't. The only time you are looking at an actual GIF file is when the quality is atrocious and the colors are messed up because it needed to be dithered.
Yes, but if you tried to share that mp4 on other platforms it would be treated as a video, and that's why gifs are still relevant.
funny enough, not true. try saving a video as mp4 but not too long and without sound (!) and it will be treated exactly like gifs on those platforms.
I tried it on these platforms:
sometimes afaik you could still have success renaming the file to .gif or .gifv I think? Telegram and Whatsapp should also work afaik.
It's pronounced GIF
Is that GIF as in GIF, or GIF as in GIF?
Yes