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Here's the promised video of my Nepenthes snacking (files.catbox.moe)

submitted 1 week ago by Guenther_Amanita@slrpnk.net to c/houseplants@mander.xyz

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I converted into a GIF, but somehow the file size increased from 4 to 120 MB 🥴
So, here's the video :)

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[-] Beacon@fedia.io 23 points 1 week ago

Gif is an ancient format, mp4 is something like 30 years newer, so file sizes are much smaller in mp4. Most "gif" files you see are in fact not actually gif files. "gif" has become a synonym for "short duration looped video"

[-] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

I didn't realize that, I would have assumed gifs, being a simpler format, would be smaller

Thank you for teaching me something! 😊

[-] HereIAm@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Gifs have a compressed look to them because it's quite limited in number of colours it can have. But gifs are ~acrually uncompressed~ barely compressed lossless images, similar to .bmp (bitmaps).

Edit: Clarified GIFs are actually compressed, just lossless.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago

GIF does do some mild compression (with an algorithm from 1984). But the compression is lossless like bitmap, if that's what you mean...

[-] HereIAm@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Thanks for pointing it out. I forgot if they were actually compressed or not.

[-] Beacon@fedia.io 4 points 1 week ago

Compressing files efficiently is hard to achieve, that's why the newer formats will produce a smaller file size. As you said, gif is a simpler format, therefore it is less advanced at compressing file size

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

In particular, GIF is just a bundle of images with generic file compression slapped on top. MP4 and similar instead analyze the frames and only store the differences compared to the previous frame.

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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025

114 points (99.1% liked)

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