[mbell]

> no one has yet, it appears, made the <video> element work for this use case.

Gfycat seems to be getting more and more popular or at least I'm personally starting to see a lot more of their links in place of imgur gif links.

http://www.gfycat.com/

[dublinben]

There's also a similar site[0] which is open source, so you could deploy it yourself if you wanted to.

[0]https://mediacru.sh/

[scrollaway]

I really wish people on HN stopped linking to gfycat and linked to mediacrush instead. The former seems like a very scummy "lowest common denominator" type of site, while the latter is open source, allows self-hosting, has deterministic hashes, uses strong https encryption, ...

[mbell]

I looked over mediacru.sh and unless I'm missing something it doesn't serve the same purpose as gfycat. The point of gfycat is to upload a gif, it converts it to webm then it gives you a bit of embed code that will try to use the webm variant but will fall back to the gif when unsupported. I didn't see anything in mediacru.sh's code that would allow gif <-> video conversion, I tried uploading a few gifs on their site as well and didn't get any video options back from the API.

[dbcooper]

Mediacru.sh should give you a "view as html 5" option. It did for me when I uploaded a gif a few minutes ago.

[untog]

It would be better if the iPhone would play <video> tags without user interaction. I get the reason why they disabled that back when the iPhone first came out, but GIFs use up more bandwidth than videos, so they're actually punishing users.

[zgohr]

Disagree. On the consumer side, I care more about auto-playing audio than bandwidth. On the content owner side, I only want my videos to autoplay (in most circumstances) if it were accompanied by the audio. If I didn't care about audio accompaniment I can already use GIF.

[untog]

Perhaps the iPhone should autoplay videos, but muted until you hit a speaker icon (or something). Either way, forcing everyone to use GIF is horrible because of how inefficient it is.

[maxerickson]

I'd like a global option and also some simple per site UI.

This is how the click to play in Firefox works, it's nice. One thing I haven't figured out how to do is trust embeds from a site (for example, Youtube and Vimeo both have well behaved embeds, so I'd like to whitelist them, but not many of the third party sites I see them on).

[syncsynchalt]

Agreed, I think of this as the "Vine" model of interaction and it's what I'd prefer. Plus leave off the icon if the webm video has no audio track.

[pornel]

That's only a UI issue. You don't need compression to be horribly inefficient to achieve that :)

For example <img src=vid.mp4> could autoplay looped video without audio, just like GIF, except using tiny fraction of bandwidth and CPU (thanks to HW acceleration) than GIF.

[rasz_pl]

this will autoplay no problem on iphone

http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/05/mpeg1-video-decoder-in-java...

:)