My last reblog reminded me of a related thing.
Converting GIF to MP4.
I mentioned that sometimes turning an image into a WebP file actually makes it larger, right? And that it turned crisp pixel art into jpeg vomit?
GIF to MP4 is perhaps even worse.
For video clips, you can make a point, sure. I won't argue, it works great on those. Different compression systems for different inputs, y'know? Right tool for the right job?
But then you drop some nice pixel animation on Twitter or whatnot. The gif was of manageable size to begin with and crisp as hell. And Twitter converts it to mp4, you get weird quirks involving the final frame's duration which is why Aseprite has a checkbox in the gif exporter to compensate, your crisp pixels fucking melt, and if you're particularly unlucky the mp4 version will be bigger than the original, completely subverting the bandwidth argument.
But wait there's more!
They say gif files are always auto-play. That's technically true, there's no such thing as a play button on a gif... or is there? Discord for example extracts the first frame to a PNG and so long as the gif isn't fully scrolled into view it actually shows that static image instead, switching between two files as you scroll it in and out of view. So why not extract a static image, have a little play button, and when you click it the gif is swapped in? You can't pause it, but you can prevent auto-playing!
Argument two, related to the auto-play thing: shocking trap clips. First frame or two is fine, then suddenly blam you get to see something horrific instead. Well. Guess what?
It doesn't matter if it's auto-playing or not, if it's a gif or an mp4. Shocking trap clips are shocking traps. They're just one or two levels above trying to download a 640x480 picture of Anna Kournikova on a 56k dial-up connection only to find from the neck down they replaced her with a horrifying monster. And that is a single image.
I'm done here.
