[HN Gopher] Burn All GIFs (2000)
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Burn All GIFs (2000)
Author : pizza
Score : 37 points
Date : 2022-08-10 18:12 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| habibur wrote:
| Interesting fact. Burn GIF called for using JPEG as alternative.
|
| And then some years later JPEG patent/payment issues came up.
| Leading to a short lived Burn JPEG movement too. Next alternate
| shown was PNG at that time.
| lazyjeff wrote:
| Are you sure you recall correctly? The linked page recommends
| upgrading GIF to PNG, "the only reasonable alternative to
| paying the Unisys tax on the web is to upgrade graphics from
| GIF to PNG format", which makes sense because it's a lossless
| conversion. PNG was a new format back that, without much
| adoption. JPEG doesn't make sense as a substitute format for
| GIF, and would greatly increase the size and decrease the
| quality of files.
| habibur wrote:
| PNG support was broken and partial on browsers at that time.
| People were waiting for PNG but it wasn't ready yet.
|
| Plus this wasn't the only page on burn GIF. This call was on
| thousands of sites. A viral movement from that time.
| naet wrote:
| I was curious what the current status of the patent was and it's
| expired.
|
| "The United States LZW patent expired on June 20th, 2003..
| According to Unisys, the counterpart Canadian patent expires July
| 7, 2004, the counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France,
| Germany and Italy expire June 18, 2004, and the Japanese
| counterpart patents expire June 20, 2004."
|
| https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/lpf/Patents/Gif/Gi...
| JoyrexJ9 wrote:
| I remember the hullabaloo around this patent and using GIFs at
| the time.
|
| But nothing ever came of it, did it? People just ignored the
| patent and carried on as normal as far as I can tell.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I don't think there was a lot of immediate action because GIF
| was already entrenched but I'm guessing a lot of people learned
| from the situation. It sure made an impression on me.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| GIF used to be a general purpose image format even for static
| images. Without the awareness campaign, enterprising devs would
| probably have extended the gif format to more than 8bpp and we
| wouldn't use PNG for that today. I'd call that a considerable
| result.
| jandrese wrote:
| The patents expired shortly afterward. I figure some lawyers
| made some money at big companies in the 2-3 year window where
| they could.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| With the patents long expired and GIF universally supported by
| software new and old, avoiding the format today is absurd. GIFs
| will work many places WEBM doesn't, and support for animated PNGs
| is dismal. For pixel art or other source material that naturally
| has a low color depth, GIF can even outperform WEBM in
| compression.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| With a significantly better alternative universally supported
| by all browsers for years, using GIFs on the web today is
| absurd. If you do actually want a lossless, auto-playing thing,
| the last browser to support animated PNGs (Edge) added it 21/2
| years ago (in the EdgeHTML - Chromium transition; I disqualify
| IE from being called a browser, BTW), and the fallback
| behaviour of showing the first frame is... well, commonly
| preferable, frankly. Animated images are mostly a terrible
| idea.
|
| (I have absolutely no idea how good APNG support is outside
| browsers, relative to animated GIF support.)
|
| But you should almost always use a proper video codec anyway,
| which are generally vastly more bandwidth- and power-efficient.
| (I freely admit the situation is messed up with video formats,
| with the only pretty-much-universally-supported codec, H.264,
| still being patent-encumbered. WebM is _almost_ there now, with
| Safari for macOS having had it for just over a year on Safari
| 14.1+ and macOS 11.3+, but there's still macOS 10.15 for a
| little longer and maybe Safari on iOS not supporting it
| (unclear), so you can't _quite_ go WebM. I will note
| incidentally that animated WebP is a thing too, and has
| slightly better support, back to Safari 14 /macOS 11 with
| Safari 14 for iOS working too.)
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| Using video formats for animated icons (think emojis) is an
| especially bad idea. Have fun loading a page of 50 different
| h264 instances!
| catach wrote:
| > Animated images are mostly a terrible idea.
|
| Consider that insisting that a usecase _is bad, and you
| should feel bad_ works against establishing credibility when
| offering alternative solutions for that usecase.
| chownie wrote:
| It's unkind and a little absurd to tone police by writing a
| strawman comment that's ruder than the actual one you're
| replying to.
| catach wrote:
| Your interpretation of my comment is so far from my
| intent that I must conclude that I have failed to
| communicate effectively.
| jefftk wrote:
| "Animated images are mostly a terrible idea" is in the
| original comment
| Jaruzel wrote:
| > LZW is used in an _obsolete_ graphic format called GIF
|
| Tell that to all the kids that 22 years later after this article,
| still use GIFs several times a day in their ubiquitous chatting
| apps. :)
|
| https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.gif
| sp332 wrote:
| Most chat apps convert GIFs to video formats like WEBM to save
| money. https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-
| blown.webm It also supports higher frame rates and more colors.
|
| Edit: A better comparison is
| https://c.tenor.com/3eIvVsG3yPYAAAPo/the-universe-tim-and-er...
| vs https://c.tenor.com/3eIvVsG3yPYAAAAd/the-universe-tim-and-
| er...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| It's lame but common for an app to support GIF but not WEBM
| as input while converting all GIF to WEBM behind the scenes.
| ki_ wrote:
| for some reason, chrome network tab says they are both 6.4MB.
| or is that normal?
| egfx wrote:
| but not drag and drop most notably
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Or it's just a GIF: $ wget
| "https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.webm"
| --2022-08-12 09:39:06--
| https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-blown.webm
| Resolving c.tenor.com (c.tenor.com)... 142.251.46.225
| Connecting to c.tenor.com
| (c.tenor.com)|142.251.46.225|:443... connected. HTTP
| request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length:
| 6381102 (6.1M) [image/gif]
| fragmede wrote:
| The first url just returns GIF regardless of the extension
| given. https://c.tenor.com/bD9vHNiR1rQAAAAd/boom-mind-
| blown.asdf is also a gif.
|
| The mp4 of it is at
| https://c.tenor.com/Oc4nf8N08jIAAAPo/mind-blow-galaxy.mp4,
| and is 12.1 MiB to the HD gif's 17 MiB
| (https://c.tenor.com/Oc4nf8N08jIAAAAC/mind-blow-
| galaxy.gif). As you noted, the SD gif is only 6.1 MiB.
| robertoandred wrote:
| There's nothing special about webm, it's just a video format.
| GIFs are also converted to MP4s.
| naet wrote:
| I work with GIFs sometimes still on production sites.
|
| I know Webm and other formats might be heavily recommended,
| but there are a ton of issues currently in the browser
| ecosystem with videos and autoplay rules (looking at iOS
| specifically as a major problem causer here...). Those issues
| can make webm/etc more trouble than they are worth unless
| you're operating at a really large scale, or you're willing
| to lose your animations for a decent percentage of users.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| That videos might not autoplay is a _feature_. That I can't
| stop GIFs from autoplaying without disabling playing at all
| is a bug. (One that I don't expect to ever be fixed, or
| even widely acknowledged as a bug, but a bug nonetheless.)
| robertoandred wrote:
| There's no autoplay issues on iOS, just make sure it's
| muted. It's the same rules as on Android.
| naet wrote:
| If an ios device is in low power mode it won't autoplay a
| muted video but it will display a gif.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The word GIF has actually expanded its meaning. It now (in
| chatting apps) just means animated picture even though it's not
| using that file format.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even now it's still the most guaranteed to work on all systems
| and platforms, even if very space inefficient.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| And if you optimize with something like gifsicle, you might
| be surprised at how small GIFs can wind up being:
| https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/
| dosman33 wrote:
| (Pulls spectacles down to tip of nose) Ha, I remember this site.
| Back in my day we had to make our animated gif's by hand. I
| remember having a lot of fun photoshopping each frame and using
| some shareware to stitch it all together into an animation.
| However, after all that work I was not going to ditch my hand
| crafted animated gifs. Thankfully Unisys probably realized there
| was not much money in going after millions of freely created
| Geocities sites. About the equivalent of the fed trying to chase
| down every autist posting on 4chan today.
| iratewizard wrote:
| They missed out on all that AIM avatar money. We could have had
| "Blingee powered by Unisys"
| djbusby wrote:
| Bored Patent Troll Yacht Club?
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(page generated 2022-08-12 23:01 UTC)