[shmerl]

Why are they using GIF for video, instead of a proper video file in the video tag?

[frou_dh]

    <div id="something-to-complain-about"

[bionsuba]

>

[frou_dh]

They say it's a art.

[crntaylor]

I think you mean "its a art".

[frandroid]

It's not worth invoking a flash container for 4 seconds of video.

[shmerl]

Did I say anything about Flash? I was talking about a video tag. And are you saying that a 4 seconds video in the video tag will be less efficient than an img tag with an animated GIF?

Personally I see no point in using GIFs, unless on a site which allows embedding images, but not videos. On a site which you control, video tag works just fine.

[alexcroox]

I think they can spend the following required time on better things:

- Deal with cross browser inconsistencies with html5 video.

- Create a poster image for the video

- Save the video format in mp4, ogg, webm

- Save out and build flash alternative for older browsers

...

...

- Realize that a gif probably would have been the best option for this post.

[shmerl]

I'd simply:

- ignore older browsers (today practically all browsers support the video tag, caring about older browsers in this context is like caring about IE6, i.e. it's bad).

- stick with a compromise solution (H.264, yeah that's sad, but until Daala will come this mess will remain, but now Firefox already supports H.264 easily, so it's not a problem anymore). If the space allows it, I wouldn't mind encoding in both WebM and MP4, just for the sake of supporting free formats.

[pritambaral]

Agreeing with co-commenter shmerl, I'd urge you to look at gfycat.

[shurcooL]

I'm guessing for legacy reasons. They've been using gifs for a long time. If this was the first time they needed an animated video, perhaps they'd jump to video tag.