[Anon1096]

mp4 with fallback to gif doesn't make much sense. More appropriate would be webm, or in the future AV1 with a fallback of h264 mp4 for video or high quality animated images. Using gif for small animations is fine, especially if you have transparency.

[s_y_n_t_a_x]

mp4 is for efficiency, gif is for compatibility.

if an mp4 doesn't play, a webm probably won't play either.

you can do mp4 -> webm -> gif if needed, but that's extra encoding that probably isn't needed.

[Wowfunhappy]

Won't webm be more efficient than h264? (I'm assuming by mp4 you mean h264).

So you'd want to do webm → mp4/h264 → gif.

(I agree this isn't worth the time to set up in most cases)

[s_y_n_t_a_x]

You're right, you would try WebM first. Like I said I'm not sure why you'd do both. Anything that plays VP8/9 should play h.264.

[seba_dos1]

WebM will play in cases where MP4/h264 won't play due to missing patent-encumbered codecs.

[s_y_n_t_a_x]

That's not a big real world issue though, but yeah if you want to provide 100% compatibility it would help a little. It's hard to justify the extra (less efficient & slower) encoding to support those few edge cases.

h.264 gives you good performance, hardware encoders/decoders, best compatibility. Most of the time just using it alone is the best value.

All that depends on how many videos you need to transcode though. If you just have a few, do all the main codecs.