Let’s look at the video formats that are worth considering. For your video to play online, the browser needs to support both the video container and the codec.īrowser support for video is a labyrinthine mess, which is part of the reason YouTube embeds are ubiquitous, but that doesn’t work for our use case. Examples of video codecs commonly used on the web include VP8, VP9, H.264 and HEVC (H.265). The file extension doesn’t tell you the codec though. mp4 extension, that means it’s using an MP4 container.

The container is the same as the file type - if a file ends with a. The two most common containers for video on the web are MP4 and WebM. (If your video contains audio then it is made up of three parts, the third being the audio codec.) Containers can store video, audio, subtitles and meta information. Videos are made up of two parts: the container and the video codec. While the HTML video element itself has been supported for many years, the same can’t be said for the wide variety of video formats. playsinline means that mobile browsers will play the video where it is on the page rather than opening in fullscreen. With this code the video will play automatically in a continuous loop with no audio. It’s easy to recreate the behavior of a GIF using the HTML video element.

There are a beguiling amount of ways to achieve the same outcome but one thing is clear: there’s really no good reason to use the bulky. Twitter, for example, has a “GIF” button that actually inserts a element with an MP4 file into your tweet - no. The word has stuck around but the image format itself is ancient and obsolete. So you want an auto-playing looping video without sound? In popular vernacular this is the very meaning of the word GIF.

Ffmpeg crop from right