A clarification (DBO)

by Beorn , <End of Failed Timeline>, Monday, May 25, 2015, 21:39 (3469 days ago) @ Morpheus

That's a good idea for GIF's. Will there be thumbnail options like with the still images? Some GIFs are enormous in dimensions too, not just filesize.

I've ranted about GIFV before, so I'll try to keep this short. Imgur (who introduced GIFV), has chosen terrible and erroneous terminology for what is essentially a default, native HTML5 video player. When you upload a video file to Imgur, they convert it into a few different formats:

• MP4
  
• WebM
  
• GIF

The MP4/WebM files are just regular video formats used in HTML5 <video> tags. The GIF is an animated GIF image. Normally, you'd always want to use a native <video> element, but browser support for <video> was pretty limited/inconsistent until somewhat recently. Nowadays, however, <video> is very reliable (YouTube has changed to this by default rather than the old Flash player method).

The benefit for GIF is that you don't need any special tags for it to work; a plain 'ol <img> tag will display the GIF in any old browser just fine. The problem with animated GIFs, however, is that, in addition to terrible image quality, the files are simply MASSIVE. As in ridiculously huge. This is because animated GIFs were never intended to be videos.

What Imgur has done—and I think this was a very poor, marketing-based decision on their part—is to mask the MP4/WebM videos behind a ".gifv" filename. Here's the important part: There is no actual file format for GIFV, it's just an HTML5 document with <video> tags. That's it. The whole thing is a big lie.

Right now, there's no native way to disable preloading of a video hosted on Imgur (although I'm looking to see if I can fix that), so please mark your threads with *VID* tags (or the like). The video dimensions seem to be locked at 720x404, so that's what the forum will display for now.