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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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You only dislike it because whatever bad app you're using to share them on doesn't support them.
Stop being the gullible fool and start hating the apps not the file format.
Edit: I also spot your .gif favouritism in there. .gif is an archaic and wasteful format, and asking for it is the same as looking at your car and whining that the fuel has no lead.
The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling
The terminology is sticking around longer than the format, too! Love me some (webm/H265) gifs.
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
If I remember it correctly you can't rally beat a good dictionary encoding with wavelet compression for certain kinds of image such as drawings, cartoons and in general images with no or flat shading.
(Might be a bit outdated on that believe as I don't really know what compression algorithms are used in JPEG-XL or WebP)
Further, GIF is lossless compression, so that means your drawing compressed with it will be much smaller and after decompression you still have the same image exactly, pixel by pixel.
That said, most drawings nowadays being digitally created with vector drawing apps means that an even better format is whatever native vector graphics format used by the app as that can scale to whatever size you want.
The guy clearly isn't familiar with a lot of image formats and is trying to find out about them by asking, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in a special community called no stupid questions, no less.
You don't need to call anyone a gullible fool and furthermore you've not actually helped to answer the question "what is webp", at all. What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression? If you wanted one less "gullible fool" you'd have to answer the question and educate, at best you've sown confusion.
Some people in the tech community just seem to have this weird superiority complex for some reason. They think they're smarter than everyone else and look down on the normies, meaning they come off... Like this guy. It's like they put all of their skill points into INT and none of them into WIS.
I feel like this answer is somewhat warranted because OP seems to have already made up their mind that it's bad. They referred to it as a "plague" and "filthy" despite not knowing what it even is. This comes across as a lack of interest in the actual answer and more just using this post as a platform to rant about it (despite knowing nothing about it).
It's not unreasonable to ask everyone here to word their questions politely (or at least neutrally). This is somewhat aggressive, so I think an equally aggressive answer is perfectly suitable.
Ok so I'm going to be making a lot of assumptions here but I think that OP's language was hyperbolic and over the top because it was tongue in cheek and trying express frustration with what to them is an inexplicable roadblock to their normal web use, whilst also genuinely trying to figure out why such an obstacle would be put in place. Until they get the necessary information they'll never see it as anything else. Looking at it that way the kind of nerd rage response devoid of the necessary context or pertinent information for the person it's directed seemed as inappropriatenas it was counterproductive.
That said, those are just assumptions I made based on the tenor of OP's speech and I guess you could argue I didn't extend the same benefit of the doubt to his respondent. I don't think that matters much though, it's still utterly pointless bloviating at someone who just clearly doesn't understand.
Why's man so vexed about file formats? Chill
Because GIF is horrible for 90% of what it's used for these days.
lol hates file format like it owes him money
Everytime a post gets displayed on a screen, it got transferred over a dozen routers, parsed by a network card, decoded byte by byte to get each pixel's color and then displayed on screen
Transferring and decoding all that extra data on millions of computers isn't free
When you make an instagram post that gets seen by millions of people it's absolutely not negligible to use webp vs a jpg and choosing one over the other because you're just... used to the extension? is downright getting unacceptable if you are at least a lil tech savvy
People need to start using newer file format for real now. It's been 20 years
...PNGs took about twenty-five years to achieve ubiquitous support across consumer software...
this is nostupidquestions, not /g/. take your meds
You don't need to call them names lmao see the comm
Why are you so mad? Those are just file formats
just?!?
Chill the hell out, maybe light one up if need be. Many people don't have the option of choosing thier own app.
Neither have they the choice of what format others use. The point here was that the apps are to blame for not supporting the format, not the format for not being supported. It's a common format nowadays.