Imgur suggests switching to gifv: like gif, only lighter, better and without brakes

Gifs are everywhere now - but the format itself, despite its artistic expressiveness, remains archaic - .gif was created in 1989, it is older than many readers of this post - as a result, we have animation in small resolutions, often of mediocre quality and almost always of enormous weight. One of the largest image hosting companies in the world, Imgur, tired of splurging on server expansion, undertook to rectify the situation by presenting the .gifv project.


An example of a familiar GIF.

In essence, this is just a container for a .mp4 video, devoid of all the video control buttons like pause and scroll, in other words, a looped video without sound.

How it works can be seen in an example. Take a 200 pixy GIF:



- It weighs as much as 5 megabytes. Can't see what is written there? Open gifv with a width of 660 pixels , which weighs one and a half times less: 3.44 MB. Before reformatting, this picture in .gif weighed 50 megabytes.

In addition to the reduced weight, the picture is also loaded without the familiar brakes of the not fully loaded gif. Reduced weight also contributes to speed, but I am silent about the best quality.

Unfortunately, there are no chances to insert the .gifv example on Habrahabr: neither habrastorage nor the parser recognize the picture in the new format. While this is its main drawback: .gifv still have to support large portals for the format to begin to live.

See what a beauty .

According to Alan Schaaf, the founder of Imgur, this is not the last improvement related to GIF that they prepared - and we will see different cool things related to GIF on Imgur soon.

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