Animated GIFs included via <amp-img> and <amp-anim> should be reencoded as videos as an AMP Cache optimization

[tomayac]

Animated GIFs can get huge. It would be great if the AMP Cache reencoded huge (ToDo: determine the threshold) animated GIFs included via <amp-img> and <amp-anim> into videos. Safari Technology preview now also accepts video as the source of an image, which might help (background article).

Related Issue: #30

Update: replaced "modern browsers" with "Safari Technology Preview".

[RReverser]

@tomayac "Modern browsers" might be a bit overstatement - it's implemented only in Safari and not even sure if it got out of Technology Preview branch.

[simevidas]

@RReverser It did not. Expected in Safari 11.1 sometime next month.

Fwiw, <video src="gif.mp4" muted autoplay loop playsinline></video> is a pretty good replacement for animated GIFs. (It doesn’t work in Samsung Internet for Android, last time I checked.)

[tomayac]

Note: not saying this should be implemented as img[src$=".mp4"], just saying it might be one option, apart from the video rewrite from @simevidas's comment above.

Chrome folks are tracking "video in images" as https://crbug.com/791658. General developer feedback on the idea seems positive (Twitter search, @brucelawson's blog post, @cramforce's tweet).

[aghassemi]

One issue to keep in mind is that iOS has hardware limit (anywhere between 4-16) on number of videos it can autoplay (this is due to decoding on hardware) So a GIF heavy page can quickly run into autoplay not working. There are workarounds for this but we don't have them in AMP yet (we do have them in AMP Story through complicated use of a MediaPool)

[Gregable]

Closing bug as this is an AMP Cache specific. That project is tracking at b/113542531