video or gif?

Question

Hey guys,

I have pretty basic question: I've seen quite a lot of twine games in last few weeks. A lot of them using gifs, almost none using webm, while as far as I understand it the webm format is simply better in every way (especially the size). So before I put some videos into my game - I'm afraid I'm missing something important and obvious- what's the reason everybody is using gifs instead of autolooping videos?

Answer 1

video is always better than gif according to me

Answer 2

Video is indeed better. I looked it up and this link has a good short history of what gif is and why video is better: https://rigor.com/blog/optimizing-animated-gifs-with-html5-video

People probably use gifs simply because it's what they're accustomed to, even though it's worse for handling animations.

Answer 3

While, for quality, WEBM is superior to GIF, the main reason why GIF is still used so frequently despite that fact is browser support.

Though WEBM is supported in most major browsers, if you take a look at WEBM on the "Can I use?" site you'll see that there are some browsers with limited or no support.  For example, around 1 in 20 people on the Internet in the US (unfortunately) still use Internet Explorer, which has no WEBM support.

Because of this you may want to use MPEG4 instead of GIF or WEBM, because MPEG4 has much wider browser support than WEBM and higher quality than GIF (which is limited to a 256 color palette).  The compression might not be quite as good as WEBM for videos of the same quality, but you'll have a lot less headaches with browser support problems.

Hope that helps!  :-)