Why is it such common trend for websites to supply a collection of "gifs" that are actually just silent videos on repeat? Shit like tenor, giphy's gifv format, among other things. Why do they bother? All it does it make the user more inconvenienced when finding what they want. Why not just say what it is?
Whenever I'm looking for something now I instinctively ignore sites like gfycat because they've only given out pseudo-gifs for so long. It's annoying.
GIF compression is horrible and so is the quality (mainly due to the 256 color limitation.)
But if you prefer downloading 10mb of data to watch a video that looks like an PlayStation game FMV from 1995, good for you.
>>2
aPNG is a thing but they probably stick with the mp4s for more browser compatibility
Gifs take up more space and provide inferior results. It's an obsolete format with tons of baggage from when they were created.
>>5
Probably because the end-user is only familiar with "gif" and not with "mp4." Alternatively these services might have existed before the widespread rollout of webm/mp4 support in browsers and they wanted to preserve the existing endpoints while still reaping the benefits of reduced bandwidth usage.
By the way it used to be possible to coax gyfcat into giving you a true gif by using "giant.gyfcat" or some other url tweak, but they may have disabled this workaround.