Yeah, I wondered below if the patent expiration in 2003 (in the US) is what lead to the explosion of the format again.
 
The whole licensing thing vaguely reminds me of the MP3 patent. With the format becoming widely-used in both players and encoders, then Fraunhofer comes to demand and collect licensing fees and royalties. Forcing companies at the time either to cough up for it, or try to develop their own replacement.

@Vinyl Fluff  
Yeah, it was a mess. CompuServe themselves got sued for using a compression algorithm that they didn’t know had been patented. They created GIF based on a published academic paper about the LZW compression algorithm, and the paper didn’t mention that the author was trying to patent it. Once then-owner (Unisys) found out GIF used their algorithm, they wanted licensing fees for all subsequent uses of GIFs, except display on websites of GIFs that had been made using licensed software. Unisys’s fees were very reasonable for software licensing fees at the time, but after GIF had been free for so long and was embedded in everything, it was basically legalized extortion. “Give us money or your entire graphics library will become unreadable.”
 
Since CompuServe had to pay Unisys after that for licensing their own GIF format, they stopped making GIF-capable viewers available except to their own paying ISP customers, and wouldn’t allow third party developers to support it without paying them and Unisys. (Not that there weren’t millions of cracked copies of CompuShow available for the asking, and all sorts of other freeware that just wasn’t licensed.) PNG was created entirely because of that. JPG also became popular in large part because of that too, although its superiority at handling screencaps was probably a bigger factor there. Also uncompressed GIF (it still compressed the palette to 256 colors and the lines to line lengths), which is supported but never caught on for obvious reasons. For the most part the format just remained widely “pirated” until the last of the international patents expired.

@Rainboom Dash  
must be outdated. I can see the frames but it’s not animating.
 
@Vinyl Fluff  
Yeah I loved Equum’s so much I had to give them a try. Also, I use most of his (and some of mine) as wallpapers using VideoWallpaper. lots of supported file types and neat features like playlists and loop duration.

@Vinyl Fluff  
gfycat saves both the gif and converts to a WebM version
 
Unfortunately you would have to link though…

@TheShadowscale  
Hey, nice work on these, BTW. I set one of the Luna ones as an image in my profile the other day simply because I loved it so much. It took an already awesome image, and made it even better.
 
Yeah, as I said earlier, the file sizes are completely understandable given the image size and complexity of the animation. It was a “man, it would be nice if they could be smaller without affecting the quality” thing. Pretty much because I’d love to post these in a few places, but it would just kill the bandwidth for so many people.

Wow… apparently due to a Chrome Update it doesn’t work anymore… at least that’s what someone said…
 
They said they talked to the developer on Twitter and the developer is unable to fix it due to a Chrome Update…

@TheShadowscale  
Here you go
 
For some reason the extension isn’t working for me… it used to…

@Rainboom Dash  
I must not have that chrome plugin XD

Like this would look terrible as a gif… but as a APNG it’s pretty good… but APNGs can get very big depending on how many colors you have in the animation (they support 24-bit color)
 
But of course gifs are still the most widely used… even though they are limited to 256 colors… sigh

@TheShadowscale  
APNGs are png animations… but the support is very limited
 
If you’re using Chrome and aren’t using an extension that allows you to view APNGs, then these will just show the first frame of the animation
 
Really gif is the way to go… it’s extremely inefficient, but… that’s really your only option
 
You could upload the gif to Gfycat and link to it in the deviantart description… but that’s really the only way you can do WebM

Hey guys. animator here. your comments have been pretty helpful in considering how I export these in the future. As it stands, my software only exports in video format (AVI, MOV, WMV) or GIF or PNG sequence. I haven’t tried PNG yet as I don’t think I’ve ever seen a png animation but I could experiment with it. As for webM, I could probably drop the GIF into photoshop then export it to webm, but by then the quality would already have been lost when rendered as a GIF :/  
So the best I can do at the moment is try to keep them as close to 25Mbs as I can (typical upload size limit).  
Thanks!

Yeah, Beats are definitely in the “overpriced” camp. They’re decent headphones, but are way overpriced. Like a lot of Bose products. Bose tends to overemphasize the bass because that’s what most people think is the “most important” thing about audio, then they slap a huge sticker price on it and people assume it’s “the best.”

@Vinyl Fluff  
Beat headphones, not the best but pretty good
 
Well, they were over 400 dollars… extremely overpriced for the quality.. I got the studio kind or whatever…
 
I mean they sound good, but not over 400 dollars good…

I’ve got extremely good hearing, always have. The last time I was tested, I had a hearing range around a 17 year old, and by the standards of age-based hearing loss, I should’ve been lower, as I’m over double that age. But yeah, once you hit about 18 your hearing starts taking a dip normally.
 
An equally-important piece in the equation for distinguishing higher bitrates is high enough quality gear, as with lower-end speakers/headphones you’re not going to get the clarity required for it. But I’m assuming we’re working with higher-quality gear to begin with, and not stuff like crappy OEM USB-powered speakers or iPod earbuds.

@Vinyl Fluff  
Yeah, unless you’re under 13 years old then most likely you can’t hear above 20khz
 
At 20 years old that number is about 17khz
 
50 years old 12-13khz
 
90 years old 4khz
 
Okay, I think I made the point
 
Anyway, I can only tell up to about a 192 mp3, 256 if I realllllllly listen.. after that, it’s extremely hard

Yeah, at 320Kbps there’s no real point in switching formats anyway. MP3, MP4, FLAC, it’s pretty much all the same at that setting. While I can definitely tell the difference between 192Kbps and 256Kbps, once you go to 320Kbps and FLAC, yeah, I’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference. And the file size is like up to 300% bigger with FLAC, and it has an associated higher battery drain on devices because of decoding such a large file. That’s why I don’t go for FLAC.
 
I’m fine with files taking up say, 14MB each. Taking up 35MB each and running by battery down 30% faster? No thanks.
 
As far as frequencies go, human hearing maxes out at 20khz. for all but a few exceptional individuals. And many are lower than that. Plus our top-end lowers as we age.

@Vinyl Fluff  
I still don’t understand why people like to convert to mp3 so much more than mp4
 
I understand posting the mp3 version online, since it might cause problems with some people… but if your device supports mp4 then why not just use mp4?
 
Eh, at 320 I guess it doesn’t matter too much
 
 
I did look at a spectrogram with a 320 mp3 versus a 320 mp4 and the only difference was about 0.5khz more at the top and the sound levels were more accurate (maybe LAME just turns down the sound by like -1db or something)?
 
a 320 mp4 goes up to about 24khz in a spectrogram, while a 320 mp3 only goes up to about 21.5 or so
 
Plenty, I can only hear up to about 16.5khz

I can understand people wanting to get to a sweet spot where the file size is minimal but the quality still good, but I just rip everything with LAME as 320Kbps.
 
I’ve got an MP3 player with a microSD slot, and a 64GB microSD card. I’ve got my entire music collection on it, and still have a ton of room to spare.

@Vinyl Fluff  
By no means does it sound good, but it’s at least listenable to some extent
 
The guitar sounds really off but besides that I don’t think it’s terrible
 
Although, the whole song sounds altered… just “off” Apple’s AAC is better at keeping that intact… but at really low bit rates it kind of “skips” and there’s other glitches.. I forgot what but I just prefer Nero if the bit rate is going to be 40 or lower
 
Also with Apple you can only go down to 32… Nero you can go all the way down to 12 (but it sounds extremely choppy at that amount… if you look at a spectrogram… oh boy..
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwSqPTVShvBlTDhDLXV5YzBWR2c/view?usp=sharing
 
This is 22kbps
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwSqPTVShvBlcl9SQjlMcmpfUms/view?usp=sharing

@Vinyl Fluff  
I’m stupid…
 

 
Well, I tend to like Apple’s version of their AAC but at lower bit rates (I mean really low bit rates… 40kbps and lower) I tend to like Nero’s better because it’s less glitchy…
 
Apple’s AAC starts to become really glitchy below 48kbps
 
Of course there’s really no reason you should need to compress that much… Although, I was able to go down to 22 with it at least sounding somewhat listenable… When I tried 21 it cut the frequency down about 3khz… that’s just how the codec was set up, I guess
 
At 22kbps it sounded really distorted and some of the sounds literally just disappeared… but it sounded somewhat crisp, the frequency cut-off was about 15.5khz
 
This is 22kbps https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwSqPTVShvBlblF2bUFKbGxzUEE/view?usp=sharing

What I was saying is that MP4 is not the successor to MP3, as in it was meant to replace it. Like Windows 98 replacing Windows 95. MP4 is a container format, not its own native format like MP3. You can use different compatible codecs in an MP4 file that may or may not sound better than an MP3 of the same given bitrate. These codecs are usually invisible to you, because when compressing something using the format, they’re usually preselected for you in the program.
 
As far as JPG/PNG, it’s true that a 100% quality-setting JPG will be nearly identical to a PNG at normal viewing distances (not zoomed in), PNG still has advantages. Every time a JPG is worked on and saved it’s recompressed, slowly degrading it more and more each time. It also introduces compression artifacts which you may not even see. If I’m working with an image with lots of white space, and I’m doing flood-fills for some of those areas, and it’s saved as a PNG, it will remain pretty much perfect no matter how many times I open and resave it. Just like a BMP file. But a JPG may introduce compression artifacts which aren’t as obvious until you try to flood-fill, and you end up with a bunch of specks.

@Vinyl Fluff  
mp4 is better
 
Have you compared the two?
 
Try a 96 mp3 and then try a 96 mp4.. there’s a huge difference
 
160 to me sounds decent… I can still tell the difference, but it’s not NEARLY as bad as 128
 
160 mp4 or 192 mp3 is about as low as you can go before it really starts degrading the quality
 
Opus is better at lower bit rates than vorbis (below 96) down to about 64
 
You can just do ALAC for apple devices… it takes about 5x longer to compress (still like maybe 10 seconds for a 5 minute song) but is only about 1% higher file size than FLAC… it still reduces the file size by about 30% from wav
 
Also… jpegs are actually really awesome and sometimes don’t reduce the quality that much at all
 
PNG is 7.9mb
 
Maximum compression with TruePNG and advpng 6.4mb
 
99 quality jpeg 1.5mb
 
Sure, you can tell a SLIGHT difference when you zoom in…. but it cut the file size by over a quarter, even after maximum lossless compression

@Ferrotter  

 
I remember this. Do you remember when CompuServe announced that people using the gif format would have to pay a licensing fee, despite originally releasing it as an open and free format?
 
I think it’s funny with the resurgence of gif animations people today thinking the format is new, when in reality it’s ancient.
 
The patent for it expired in 2003. I wonder if that’s the reason you suddenly saw them explode everywhere again.

GIF wasn’t originally really meant to be animated. It was interlaced so that on ancient dial-up connections (9600 baud modems existed then but were rare and expensive, and there was nothing faster) you’d at least get something of a picture faster than you could download the entire thing (and if you realized it wasn’t something you wanted, you could cancel the download partway through), and the longer you downloaded the better your resolution would get (up to the actual image’s size). Because interlacing works sort of like a TV signal, it was later realized you could interlace the entire thing several times over, giving you rasterized video. Two years later animations had become commonplace enough that they added timing signals, so that your playback speed wouldn’t be determined entirely by your graphics speed. But animating umpteen frames (except with Flash) still requires uploading all the frames. The real problem here isn’t that there are so many frames (well, it is, but that’s unavoidable), it’s how each frame is encoded.
 
GIF encodes images by lossless compression. It was made for simpler graphics without subtle color variations. In other words, it does better with the actual show characters (large fields of one color) than screencaps (NTSC-induced variances in color within what were originally fields of one color) or detailed artwork (actual variances in color). To over-simplify, the majority of its compression is turning long lines of one color into, basically, the length of that line. In other words, instead of specifying the RGB value of purple 1000 times (or even saying that it’s purple 1000 times) for a 1000-pixel-long section of Twilight’s body, you’d define purple once for the whole image, then when you get to that spot you’d say only (purple, 1000). So say a line of Twilight’s body on a white background would be something like (white, 500)(dark purple, 10)(purple, 1000)(dark purple, 10)(white, 500). GIF is still the best format for that kind of graphics. For this, not so much.
 
Unfortunately, PNG may not be better, because while it compresses subtle color changes better, it also allows more of them, and greater depth of colors. You’d need to force your graphics to 8 bit color and select only 256 colors (no mixing) as your entire palette before you even start painting, to probably achieve better compression than GIF. If you painted and then encoded, you’d be looking at make the animated GIF, decompose it to individual frames, re-save each frame as PNG, then put them back together as an animated PNG. And you’d lose quality significantly compared to the original animated GIF due to encoding mismatches. Really what you want is the raw file for whatever program you used to make this animation, but Derpibooru and a browser can’t possibly display that. Nobody without that program (whatever it is) could. Maybe a still here and a link to the full image looped for a few minutes on YouTube, or to the raw file on some other file storage site? I don’t know of a perfect solution.
 
P.S., I hope the jellyfish doesn’t sting her.

@Rainboom Dash  

 
Completely different formats for different things. MP4 is not a successor to MP3. MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Layer 3, which is meant for audio. MP4 is MPEG-4 Part 14, which is a container format for video and audio.
 
I still prefer using MP3, but other formats like OGG Vorbis and FLAC are becoming nearly universally-supported now (excluding Apple devices) and offer better quality-to-bitrate. Especially FLAC, which is lossless and audibly transparent to the original source (in fact, you can even use FLAC files to recreate the original CD 1:1.) But the trade-off is the filesize is much, much larger than MP3 or OGG.
 
I can’t stand 128Kbps MP3s either. When the format took off, dial-up was still the primary internet access people had, and large file sizes (10MB was fairly large on dial-up) sucked, combined with more limited storage space at the time, 128Kbps was settled on as the “standard” for “CD-quality” (which it wasn’t) and most people couldn’t tell the difference, especially with crappy speakers/headphones. Even today you’ve got people who don’t care if they’re playing a track back in crappy ripped-from-YouTube quality.
 
I rip all my MP3s in 320Kbps, which is the max the format officially supports. That’s the quality level I prefer. And I’m one of those people who can tell the difference in higher bitrates, and have the hardware to take advantage of it. 128Kbps-160Kbps is really noticeable. 160Kbps-192Kbps slightly less so, but still noticeable. 256Kbps-320Kbps is where it starts to get a little murky. It also depends on the track due to the way MP3 compresses things.