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Allow for short HTML5 video's (instead of animated gifs)

H3g3m0n 12 years ago • updated by Sushubh Mittal 11 years ago • 4
I'm not suggesting full videos, theres already sites like youtube/vimeo for that and it would require probably require drastic changes to the CDN and storage.

Just as an alternative to animated gifs.

Just:
* Limited file sizes/lengths to sizes similar to animated gifs.
* Loop like gifs.
* No sound.
* No controls.
* Could even support a fallback to animated gifs when there is no support.

It would:
* Save file sizes/bandwidth
* Give better quality.
* Encourage other services to support the standard (forums and so on).

Compressing video into a sequence of pictures like we see with animated gifs is a silly hack.

Sushubh Mittal 12 years ago
Animated GIFs are easy because they work out of the box. Videos have embedding related problem. Images are supported almost everywhere and are more likely to be treated as fair use compared to actual videos. Meanwhile I am still waiting for support for WebP :P 
+1
Answer
Declined
Sarah 12 years ago
Ismael Barros 11 years ago
GIfs are as easy as they're evil. Short animations that would take 400KB, take 4MB and a extra-high-bandwith internet connection to load. This is specially critical on mobile, with limited CPU, limited battery life and limited data plan.

4Chan has supported webm along gif for a while now, and it works perfectly on Chromium and Firefox on Linux. To have a similar experience on Imgur, I need to use the "Imgur to Gfycat" Chromium extension.

It's 2014, let's move on already.
Please, re-open this issue.
Sushubh Mittal 11 years ago
Right. Twitter is converting Animated GIFs to MP4 to make them work better on all platforms. Animated GIFs are painful to view on mobile devices. I wish Imgur and Google+ also switch to converting them to videos formats that have hardware acceleration. Embedly did a blog post on why Twitter's implementation is a good idea: 

http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-telling-you-about-gifs

PS: Imgur Support has moved to http://help.imgur.com/ so you might want to put this request there. 

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