[iainmerrick]

Here’s another completely different use case (I came across this while googling unsuccessfully for a way to make videos loop):

You’re setting up a booth at a convention. You want to have a video playing on a TV. It should play forever in a loop.

Apparently, with any normal “smart” TV, that’s very hard to do! You can put a video file on an SD card or something, but you probably can’t persuade the built-in video player to loop it (edit: seamlessly, anyway). You can’t just set a loop flag on the file like you can with a GIF, because proper video formats don’t have any such flag.

I guess you could set up a web page with a looping video on it? That’s more of a hassle than just putting a file on an SD card, and less reliable if the net connection is spotty.

There are companies that will literally sell you a hardware dongle just to loop videos. It’s ludicrous.

[paavoova]

What you describe is a software limitation in the TV's video player if it doesn't have an option to loop. Right now, I can open up a video in Firefox, say a VP8 WebM, and there's a right-click option to loop it. Every noteworthy media player (VLC, MPV, etc) supports looping. Websites can tag video to loop. Likewise, you're able to loop a gif even if it doesn't have a loop flag - the loop flag doesn't need to exist, it can be external to the format be it GIF or video.

[deadbeef404]

The point is that if I send you a gif, you currently don't need to tell whatever program you opened it in that it's meant to loop. When I send you a gif, I expect it to be looped on your end. It's part of the gif package that we've come to love. Of course the loop flag doesn't strictly need to exist, but if someone has to perform an extra step to do what gifs were already doing, then no one will use it as a replacement.