Technology

Counterpoint: GIFs loop by default in basically every app, WEBM doesn't

I’ve honestly given up on support of new formats.

Here we are, 2026, and brand new software like Lemmy:

• Doesn’t support AVIF

• Doesn’t support JXL

• Doesn’t support WebP

• Won’t upload short, small videos either.

Meanwhile:

• Many clients won’t play animated WebP

• Most clients won’t play APNG

• Many won’t load AVIF

• Basically only Apple/Safari will load JXL

• VP8/VP9/AV1 support in video isn’t universal

What am I supposed to do?

I used to send support requests over this, but I’ve given up. We are going to be stuck with SDR JPEGs and blocky GIFs forever, especially since media format literacy seems to be decreasing.

Webm is supported almost everywhere now and manages better quality at higher framerates and smaller file sizes.

Anybody who has compared animated WebM vs animated JPEG XL?

I used to love optimising images in gif format. I would make like 4–30kb memes and animations for my friends in Photoshop CS2. It's actually extremely efficient and lightweight if you do it right… You have cool tools like transparency between frames and unbroken colour blocks don't take any additional storage space. There's nothing wrong with gif.

The problem is how people use them. We take a live action video file and shove it through an automated converter tool that doesn't give a shit about efficiency and will do a complete repaint between frames and use 256+ colour palette. Then you end up with an ugly dithered overcooked piece of shit 50mb 10 second animation. Gif was not designed for this…

"...massive files..."

I thought the file size was part of the format specification, no?

Problem is the medium people use to send GIFs to each other doesn’t support any alternatives

the same file without visual quality loss could be a 156.79 KiB webp file, saving energy, internet, and storage costs

Which are probably just web front ends to the above?

My folder like that is just named ★

that's still massive, an animated webm will probably be more useful

I mean, it's still going to have the pants beaten off it by WebM or AVIF for anything originating from a video camera.

GIF was just never intended to be a video format. I have a hard time thinking of something where it's really competitive. Maybe if you had a recorded lossless video of a small-palette video game, like, NES era or earlier, then GIF might be a solid choice. I'd still think that APNG or MNG would probably outperform it.

GIF animations really only got a boost because there was a period of time when it was all that browsers could display.

EDIT: Also, if one is using GIF...I dunno if ffmpeg does this by default, but most video formats have I-frames and then frames that depend on those. When seeking, a player will seek to the nearest prior I-frame and then decode from there.

I don't believe that GIF 89a has a formal concept of I-frames, because the format was never intended for real video. But it is possible to create frames in a GIF 89a animation with transparent areas that don't differ from the prior frame, and this achieves some of the efficiency benefits that a video format would get. I know that there have been GIF 89a conpressors that will do this. The downside is that it kills seekability, since after a seek in a player thst just starts drawing from the current frame, you'll see only some of an image until the next time that a pixel in a frame is non-transparent and gets redrawn. But for applications where you don't care about seekability, that may help mitigate some of GIF's limitations for animations.

In all honesty, though, the right answer for video is almost always "use a newer format than GIF".

There is this older tutorial from 2015 that goes into more detail and includes examples.

Gif is indeed a shit format for the purpose.

Video codecs are downright magical and everything down to your average toaster packs a hardware decoder for h264, so this is the bare minimum we should actually be using for this use-case.