(Note, I also added a muted attribute to avoid repeating goat slurping sounds, which probably won’t engage users.) Can I Make the Video Loop Look Like a GIF? Yes you can make your video loop! By adding autoplay and loop to the video tag, you can force your video to loop. One major concern with animated GIF files is the file size. Since the GIF is essentially a ‘flipbook’ of discrete images, compression only occurs on a per image basis. Movie codecs allow for x/y compression per frame, but also compress across the third dimension of time. The advantage of testing across time allows for much higher compression, as only changes across frames must be recorded in the file. (You can see and hear the original video featuring high-definition goat slurping here.) On a slow or congested cellular network, a 3.3MB file might take some time to download. The full color movie that it was sourced from is only 1.4 MB. That file is now 237% larger and has fewer colors and no audio track.

Unfortunately, that is completely incorrect. You might think that the loss of resolution and color would reduce the file size. GIFs only support 256 colors, which adds a ‘grainy’ look to the video, which I believe is an important part of the Animated GIF ‘kitsch’. To turn my giphy.gif into 33 PNG files into individual images, I used ffmpeg: You can pull apart the GIF file to see the individual images. GIFs can host many frames inside one file (essentially discrete images) and then display them in quick succession.

How does this work? Animated GIFs use the frame feature inside the GIF format.

To support this theory, here is an animated GIF of my goat Nora, eating a fresh cedar branch: I have begun to see many mobile apps relying heavily on animated GIFs and PNGs in their content. There is no question that short video adds motion, interest, and excitement to your website or mobile app – which can help make your customers more immediately interested – and keeping them engaged is an important part of a successful site or app.

Ffmpeg gif reduce size