Here’s the video formats commonly in use in the web and the browser support: Video format browser support If we’d like to use a video instead of a gifs, the video replacement should more-or-less fill this criteria. 'Old tech' does not necessarily equal bad, we still use hammers for example. Videos can act like gifs and have a much effective compression algorithm, videos also don’t need to be fully loaded to start the playback. But gifs were never meant to handle anything else than simple graphics. Gif is an extremely inefficient way to pack video, where as the static gif image is pretty good format for showing graphical shapes with few colors. The technology behind animated gifs is old and clunky, a remnant of the 90s clipart and guestbooks internet. Technologically speaking gifs are in the same club with Macintosh II, Windows 1, and floppy disc. Graphics Interchange Format, invented in the late 80s, still persisting in our daily lives. I originally wrote this post in 2015, but I’ve now (2020) rewritten it.

Ffmpeg gif to mp4 windows