And it completely falls apart sometime. GIFs actually work but try browsing Reddit’s video alternative to GIFs anywhere outside of the reddit office and it struggles to even play for a second.
We have engineers replacing tech that works with their half baked barley functioning versions that lose all the benefits of sharing and remixability of a GIF file.
I don't understand what you're saying. I'm sure the video files reddit serves are perfectly playable in standard video players, since web browsers can obviously handle them. If download bandwidth is the concern, you should know it would be even worse with gif files, which are much larger than visually equivalent animated gifs. If reddit were serving up real gifs, they would load even slower.
Video files are easier to share, on account of being smaller, and easier to edit since you can use real video editing tools which is a lot easier than editing a gif frame by frame in gimp.
The only sense in which gifs are superior is they're easier to write a parser/renderer for from scratch, but I think that's relevant to virtually nobody.
Video: loads video player controls (slowly); waits; doesn’t start playing; starts playing but doesn’t let me choose volume quickly enough; stops playing; loading; jumps several seconds; appears to be at the end but isn’t finished loading; won’t loop; try to rewind or jump to position; doesn’t work; UI controls appear to have disconnected from anything; can’t rewind replay or watch; get annoyed; reload page entirely or quit it.
This is where you dismiss everything I’ve written with an “it doesn’t happen” because “you’re sure” videos are “perfectly playable” and “obviously work”, but you’re wrong, they don’t, they have glaring huge UX failure modes I hit all the time for years on mobile Safari with a normal person not mega fast internet connection.
None of that is the format, it sounds like your media player (or whatever js webshit reddit has implemented in their abominable redesign...) is just shit. "Mega-fast" internet would benefit you more for gifs than it would for real video formats, on account of those gifs being larger. Why do you think reddit wants to serve you video files instead of gifs? They're not doing it to fuck with you, I promise. They do it because it saves them bandwidth, and therefore it saves you bandwidth too. The solution to your problems is not using an obsolete inefficient image format for video; rather the solution to your problems is getting software that isn't totally broken.
Since your so skeptical, let's put some numbers to it: Here is a gif: https://0x0.st/zY8f.gif It's a staggering[0] 3.5MB, on a 56kbps connection it would take you over eight minutes to download it. I uploaded this gif to imgur, who then converted it into this mp4: https://0x0.st/zY8O.mp4 It's less than 700KB. On a 56kbps connection it would take you less than two minutes to download this. This is not an atypical example, an order of magnitude improvement is pretty typical when converting gif "videos" into real video formats.
Eight minutes vs two minutes... you tell me, which is faster? The faster your internet connection gets the narrower the gap gets, which is opposite of the trend you're suggesting. These conversions benefit people with slow internet more than they benefit those with fast internet.
[0] (For shits and giggles, I also encoded a VP9 webm with ffmpeg: https://0x0.st/zY8v.webm From what I understand you cannot play this on your iphone (because Apple), but it's less than a tenth the size of the original gif and looks identical to my eye.)
> None of that is the format, it sounds like your media player (or whatever js webst reddit has implemented in their abominable redesign...) is just st.
Re-read my comment this was exactly my point. We swapped something that worked everywhere for a custom players on every site and re-encoding therefore destroying what the artist intended.
We have engineers replacing tech that works with their half baked barley functioning versions that lose all the benefits of sharing and remixability of a GIF file.