

You probably shouldn’t use GIFs in a professional context, unless crappy video quality for some reason is preferred by your client. In fact, they can make you look unprofessional. Unfortunately, when video quality matters, GIFs are pretty terrible. GIFs are not all bad thoughĪnimated GIFs are fine as a “video format” when you want to share a laugh with your friends. Well, our site analytics state that our target audience is between 15 and 45, and thus far we haven’t registered any users with outdated browsers in 2018.ĭitching GIF (for the most part) is a no-brainer for us. We want to help to push technology forward, and the best way to do that is by using and promoting modern technologies (when they deserve it!). And that leads me to why we switched to WebM here on Techstacker (besides the obvious). The only thing WebM has going against it is that it doesn’t work in old archaic browsers. In a nutshell, WebM can do the same as GIFs can, while having superior quality and having a smaller file size. With WebM, you can control video playback like start, stop, autoplay and loop, by leveraging the HTML5 element’s properties.WebM is compatible with all modern browsers, but it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer.WebM’s visual quality is higher than GIFs, and at a much smaller file size (!) as you saw earlier.WebM is an open source audio-video for HTML5, built by Google.So much that GIF animation services like Giphy haveīecome integrated on Facebook. GIF animations have become hugely popular in modern times. In comparison, the PNG format has 16 million colors.Īltogether, GIFs are popular for a reason, they’re easy to work with, they don’t take up that much space, and they’re cross-compatible. The gif format only has support for 256 colors.GIFs are generally low FPS (frames per second) which is why they rarely look smooth (there are exceptions).GIFs are generally low resolution (width x height).GIFs are compatible in all browsers, all the way back to Internet Explorer 6 (!).GIFs are easy to embed on all types of websites.Lossless means that it doesn’t lose quality when you reduce its file size. GIF is a lossless format for image files.GIFs support both animated and static images.Let’s lay out the basics of each technology. But if you want some more technical facts and learn a bit about the pros and cons of WebM and GIF, continue reading! Were you already convinced by the previous segment? I understand. But guess what, even if the quality was identical, the difference in file size is astronomical, no less.ĭo I have to mention that swapping out GIFs with WebMs will have a massive impact on the overall page load (performance) of your website and web apps? WebM vs GIF I showed the GIF vs WebM comparison to few people, and some couldn’t tell the difference in quality. GIFs are not bad, they’re just technically inferior to WebM! Is your mind blown yet? Yes, this is a gif, and it perfectly captures my initial reaction to WebM. That’s a massive reduction of file size, and the WebM playback is smoother than the GIF too. The GIF video takes up more than 9 times as much space as the WebM video(!) But seriously, this is why: This is a GIF: (15 FPS, 67 KB) This WebM (15FPS, 7 KB.!) Long story short: for the most part, WebM wipes the floor with GIFs.
#Png animator webm software#
But it never crossed my mind how amazing and wonderful this relatively unknown open-source software is for video (and audio) playback.

Sure I heard about it before (I feel like I need to say that). That’s when a colleague told me about WebM, a video/audio format that had completely slipped my radar. Unless you like working with massive file sizes to get a high enough FPS (I don’t). That’s when it hit me: the GIF format is simply not good enough to render even a simpleĪnimation, without severely degrading its quality. I recently wrote a tutorial about CSS animations. Solidify yourself as a high-end modern website. At least if you care about high-quality video, performance, and want to Today you’ll learn why we did that, and why you probably should too. Here at TechStacker, we’ve recently switched from using GIFs to WebM for short videos in our tutorials. But as the modern web gets more and more standardized, more and more facts are in favor of WebM. Should you use GIF or WebM as your short video playback format? The answer is that it depends on the context.
