The GIF format has been around for 25 years now and not alot of improvement has come along. UNTIL NOW!
It’s introduction in 1987, the Graphics Interchange Format brought us a bitmap image that could support full-color animations, packaged in 8-bits per pixel resolution. These images were compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch(LZW) a lossless data compression so they didn’t lose image quality.
The issue with GIFs is that even with compression, they are HUGE when compared to other online images. If your website is covered with alot of GIF images, this can slow things down and fill drive space up very rapidly.
Until now no one has been able to make a better GIF, until you get a look at Imgur’s plan’s I’d say someone just has.
The process that Imgur has laid out is to create a new form of video that acts like a GIF, using MP4 video compression. When you upload an MP4 video, the result is cleaner and sharper than a regular GIF animation. The efficiency of the format will allow Imgur to process 50MB files rather than the 5MB limit offered at this time.
When the file is downloaded back onto your computer it will revert to an MP4 file, and no longer have any GIFV. If you were to reference the link on say Facebook or Twitter however from Imgur’s site. It would deliver the 5MB image rather than the 50MB making load times MUCH faster and efficient. The format was optimized with Social media sites in mind.
Imgur plans to submit the GIFV specifications to the standards organizations by the end of 2014 with hopes that adoption would take place in 2015.
What does this all mean you say? FAST Loading images shared to Facebook and Twitter and not to mention going from 50MB download to a 5MB download would seriously drop some of that dataplan usage on your mobile device.
Watch for those .gifv extensions coming VERY SOON! Drop on over to Imgur and have a look at their examples.