57

Recently Imgur announced to drop the legacy GIF format with the new GIFV format.

Why GIFV?

  1. It's lightweight
  2. Being a video format, it also allows more flexibility like not autoplaying or autoloading by default which .gif just disrespects. Oh, and you can pause it too.
  3. It supports streaming and loads much much faster than .gif to start with.

GIFV is a mutated .mp4. As GIF's are already oneboxed in the chat, we should onebox .gifv as well.

EDIT :

GifV falls back to webm if .mp4 is not supported

Improve this question
16
  • 16
    FFS, people; if you can't discuss the display of animations without it devolving into name-calling, there's no hope. Way to taint the idea. If anyone has any legitimate arguments for or against this, post 'em in an answer.
    – Shog9
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 21:02
  • 2
    Some people can't even internet :(
    – Sterling Archer
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 21:08
  • @Shog9 thanks. I apologize for calling him a troll but he never read imgurs original post... reminded me of folks on stackoverflow
    – ShrekOverflow
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 21:09
  • 7
    Put it in your question, @Abhishek - no reason to bother engaging in comments if you can clarify in the post itself.
    – Shog9
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 21:28
  • What's the browser support for gifv? I've never heard of that format before.
    – John Dvorak
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 8:28
  • @JanDvorak gifv is a fancy way of rendering muted mp4 videos. Read the Imgur announcement, it's all there.
    – Madara's Ghost
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 11:49
  • Can we stop calling it GIFV though? They are videos, so just embed MP4s in chat, with muted audio and looping by default.
    – poke
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 12:12
  • 3
    @poke sure, but GFIV is still shorter to type out than, "muted, looped MP4" lol
    – ndugger
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 13:06
  • 1
    If you're going to support the oneboxing of animated gifs/videos then there really ought to be a way of stopping them.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 13:58
  • @ChrisF to be fair, current gifs are "unstoppable" for lack of better words, and they're already supported.
    – Sterling Archer
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 15:17
  • 1
    @SterlingArcher - then I'd be happy for current gifs to become unsupported ;)
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 15:19
  • 2
    Well that's a shame, I disagree of course, but to each their own.
    – Sterling Archer
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 15:20
  • GifV @ChrisF allows extreme extensibility cause its literally a video :-)
    – ShrekOverflow
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 16:18
  • 1
    @Abhishek - you're missing my point. I'd rather that there was no oneboxing of animated anythings in chat. If I want moving pictures I'll go to YouTube.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 16:19
  • 3
    @ChrisF post your thoughts in an answer. I also would like to disable oneboxing when needed. This last year in chat I have seen a few giant oneboxed phallus, a topless creature bearing both mammaries and a phallus and had to explain quite a few scantily clad women to my boss and co-workers.
    – DJSpud
    Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 14:49

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
48

I think this is a good idea.

No, these are not videos. They are gifs in a smaller format. Gifs auto-play, these are just gifs that are higher quality and slightly longer. There are no ads, no sound, and it's becoming very popular on imgur and will most likely, render the .gif format obsolete.

I think we should stick with the times and allow this feature in.

Despite the "technological" arguments, there is virtually no difference between this and a gif besides quality (ergo filesize), length, and the potential ability to prohibit auto-play and even a pause feature.

I would welcome that.

Improve this answer
2
  • 3
    Would be extremely helpful for the Game Development chat. We currently have to upload extremely large gif files to show what we are working on. This would allow us to share higher quality and smaller file size files.
    – AttackingHobo
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 6:03
  • 6
    It would be wonderful to stop having tabs crash when we overload them with large gifs. I fully support this, would love to see it.
    – jlindenbaum
    Commented Feb 25, 2015 at 20:17

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .