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Thanks. This is going straight to my ‘cool info to never be used’ pile.
My folder like that is just named ★
Don’t get mad at people for using logical command line switches.
Get mad at ffmpeg for trash defaults.
Nope
Nobody: zzzzz
Me reading about 256 bit color conversion at 3 am: 🤔🥱🤓🤷💀🐩
Most people do this:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 output.gif…no, most people have never heard of ffmpeg and throw it in an online converter.
Which are probably just web front ends to the above?
Not just that, sometimes they are also data stealers and virus makers!
Definitely, but then it’s on whoever made the web tool. Still not “most people”.
I always liked to use Photoshop with the ‘save for web (legacy)’ export. Gives you a handy preview of how big it will be and lots of options.
A lot of that is mostly the fault of the technology. But we still like it anyway.
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.
I know that’s hyperbole, but I’ll be cold in the ground before a “smart” toaster is allowed in this house.
As much as everyone likes to trash on it, this is part of what webp is for. Animated, loopable images at super small sizes that display on just about anything that runs a browser.
Really interesting and useful read, thanks.
ffmpeg <3 good info here, also give Gifsicle a look if you need help getting your gifs smaller
the same file without visual quality loss could be a 156.79 KiB webp file, saving energy, internet, and storage costs
I just tested this with a 8-second, 35MB mp4 video.
The “don’t do this” command made a crappy looking 316MB gif.
The suggested pair of commands, using the palette file, made a 57MB very nice looking gif.
Seems legit to me but I’m not, as you say, an expert.
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 a decent variety of Web 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 that 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. There may not be any frames wirhout transparent areas nearby, and the player has no way to know where to look for one. 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”.
