Question for 10 Second Anime fans: Would you rather have embedded videos?

 

Would you believe that an animated gif can be 10 times larger than an h264 encoded mp4? That's not surprising, since the gif compression code has been the same since the 1990's. So, viewing a 10 second animated gif means downloading 2-7 MB, depending on how active the pixels are between frames. A video encode, which is more concerned with fooling the eyes between frames, instead of producing picture perfect stills, turns into a 500 KB download. The only problem being many video upload sites require flash to play embedded videos in your browsers.*

 

If I get any feedback, I might change things around. In terms of process, encoding video is no different than producing an animated gif, just clicking a different button. The uploading to a host is the same as well. Personally, I prefer an animated gif, since the file is much more portable than an embedded video. SkyDrive, with its sharing features, can allow direct download as well.

 

*SkyDrive does play the actual file, but offers no embedded player, only a link to the SkyDrive site, where you can watch the video there. Looks like not a viable option for keeping eyeballs on the blog page.