Animated GIFs and Space vs Time - Computerphile

"it was the tumblr of its day... it was awesome and then yahoo took it over and it was no longer awesome" wow... history repeats itself...

They work everywhere, on every OS. Except for the IOS photo viewer.

I'm too young to remember GeoCities, so I just imagined a world where every single Tumbr user has to code his page by himself. Bloody hell.

This explains why when a video messes up, you get their face moving across the screen in the silhouette of a hand and it continues to get messed up until a new key-frame is shown.

Oh, I was making Let's Plays once and I played Sonic Adventure and Final Fantasy VII. I noticed that the video files for Final Fantasy were much smaller than the ones for Sonic and now I finally know why: Sonic was pretty fast with the camera moving all the time, whereas Final Fantasy was only moving models on a fixed background. So when I recorded Sonic, the difference between each frame was much bigger and thus more data had to be stored.

you should do a video on webm

I have the impression that Tom Scott's content is easier to edit than most of your contributors'. He seems to have his thoughts collected beforehand and can then just output in a nicely dense, yet easy to understand manner. Right?

5:55 ... i hear you, man

I just realised that the animation at the end of the video turns the Computerphile tag into an ending tag to match with the same tag at the start, showing that it's now the end of the video, and I love that! 😁

It's actually really sad that there isn't a widely used more video-like alternative for GIF. There are APNG and WebP, but nearly no browser supports them :(

The Italian position on the /gif/ - /ʤif/ debate: In the Italian language, the sound of the letter G depends on what follows it. So we have: -A soft sound for GIA, GE, GI, GIO and GIU; -A hard sound for GA, GHE, GHI, GO and GU; -A ɲ sound (spanish ñ) for GN+; -A ʎ sound for GLI and GLI+. Yes, exactly, a soft sound for GI. And that's why most of Italians have always pronounced it /ʤif/ before the announce that it's actually /ʤif/ instead of /gif/: written as that, is just soft in our mind. And this, is something you might not know.

Yay, I love Tom! He always talks about such interesting topics, and with such a passion! :)

Random fact: Lookup tables are commonly used for demo scenes on older machines because calculating sines takes up way too much of the cpu cycles.

The point at the end is what I love the most about this video. Creating animated gifs has in itself become an artform, and the restrictions it has as an artistic medium has become a vehicle to so much creativity all over tumblr.

I wish that animated alpha channel PNG were considered canonical.  They fix so many of the problems with animated GIFs it's absurd, but as of a few years ago, Firefox was the only major browser to support it. You can have a larger colour palate than 256 colour GIFs, and with the alpha channel, you can define a seamless transparency instead of the nightmare you frequently see when a transparent animated GIF created for a light background finds its way onto a dark background, or vice versa.

GIFs were designed not in the mid-90s, but in 1987 (with a minor revision in 1989). The spec hasn't changed since then. Initially, most GIFs just stored single images. The spec always supported animated files, but they were rare in the format's early days. Now, they're the only kind anyone uses.

The idea that it should be pronounced "giff" because the G stands for graphics is silly. There's no such rule for acronyms. But pronouncing it "jiff" is still silly for one very important reason: When you hear "giff", and you know that old file extensions contained 3 letters, you know the word is spelled "GIF." When you hear "jiff," you could spell it "GIF," but you'd be more likely to spell it "JIF." In English, nearly all one syllable words that start with G have the so-called "hard G" sound. This wouldn't be  a big problem, except that the "JIF" extension exists. It stands for JPEG interchange format. (The J in images tends to mean that something is connected with JPEG.) So saying "giff" is less ambiguous.

Computerphile man remembers geocities. And perhaps the browser-wars. I remember the GIF89 licensing controversy that had many convinced to change to the free PNG format which was made suitable for animation then

R.I.P YAHOO! GEOCITIES 1994 - 2009 "IT WAS WONDERFUL, AND IT WAS BOUGHT BY YAHOO, AND IT WAS NOT WONDERFUL ANYMORE"

You said Geocities and got me on a nostalgia trip... now I'm compelled to go listen to hamster dance for the first time in years.