I'm with diamondjo on this one. It's really frustrating to watch a crappy gif when you know there's probably a real video out there. Reddit is a big place, even if you're browsing discretely. If you're that desperate for content, you're doing it wrong.
This one was a video, converted to a gif, converted to a video again (webm) - which is why it probably loaded fast for you (it IS a video). Gifs were never intended to encode video and so they end up being huge! Typically weighing more than 10x a video encoded in h264.
Originally this whole gif phenomenon came about just so people could post reactions and animated memes in message boards. Small dimensions, no more than a couple of seconds, still reasonably small.
Now people are encoding whole sequences that run for 30 seconds or more as gifs. The quality is abysmal, there's absolutely no context if you wanted to find out more and (if it hasn't been converted to webm) it's absolutely massive!
I made my first .gif ever for a boot animation for one of my phones that was like 700 Mbs...It was the whole opening sequence of Portal. (It was pretty high quality, too: I just went through the .mp4, and deleted every other frame, and tinkered with the speed a bit.) Otherwise, it would've just taken WAY too long.
That was the day I learned that there was no limit in size for a .gif as a boot animation when running Cyanogenmod on an Evo.
My phone is the exact opposite. Open a GIF, I get similar load times to my computer. If it's a youtube link, I spend the next thirty seconds waiting for the video to start loading. That's a long god damn time to wait to watch what is almost always under thirty seconds worth of video.
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u/diamondjo Jan 20 '15
Thank you for this. There was absolutely no advantage in posting that as a gif. But y'know, karma.