Web Development

0 readers

1 users here now

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

Are short mp4s preferable to gifs for brief animated site elements, or...? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 years ago by ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to c/webdev@programming.dev

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

From what I gather, I don't know that there's a new norm in this regard yet, besides recognizing that gifs are increasingly old & clunky (despite being fun & amusing), and so I don't know if mp4s or webms or something else might be better if wanting to keep a site lightweight while still having some animated elements.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kornel@programming.dev 14 points 2 years ago

Generally yes.

GIF's ancient LZW compression is remarkably ill-suited for modern CPUs, and more expensive than modern algorithms. Combined with significantly larger file sizes, it costs much more to decode, on top of increased costs of transfer and caching.

GIF might have an edge if the animation is very small (<16px, few frames).

It also gets messy if you need to play hundreds of animations. GIF will be terribly inefficient, but also browsers aren't designed to have hundreds of video elements, so both will eat memory in their own way, and it will vary which is worse.