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.
- 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.
Comments
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.
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.
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.