>I wonder how many (huge) sites like imgur it would take saying "we're doing webm, if your browser doesn't support it you get a huge, slow GIF instead" for everyone just to settle on a single format?
It's very unlikely to see that happen, since using H.264 doesn't cost a dime in royalties for sites like imgur that serve the content for free (ads don't count as per the H.264 licensing terms). The only trouble is really on Firefox and any other browser that wants to implement a built-in H.264 decoder, but nothing stops them from working around that via things like OpenH264 or by using system decoders and so on.
The same will likely happen with H.265/HEVC, as the recently published licensing terms made it completely royalty-free to use the format itself (including for commercial purposes, you have to pay royalties for that with H.264), and you only have to pay to distribute decoders & encoders.
Personally I wish browser vendors would just use whatever's installed on the user system for playing web videos, but for some reason that's not okay because "we need at least one unified always playing format for the web!" and then we don't get that anyway, as the whole WebM mess has clearly shown...
Anyway, since imgur is doing the conversion to video by themselves, there's not really any reason why they couldn't do both H.264 MP4s and VP8 WebMs... supporting only one format makes more sense if you allow direct user-encoded video uploads like 4chan does with its WebM support for example. Gotta say I don't like this whole "hey we took HTML5 video with 'autoplay loop muted' properties and branded it GIFV!" shtick, though.
It's very unlikely to see that happen, since using H.264 doesn't cost a dime in royalties for sites like imgur that serve the content for free (ads don't count as per the H.264 licensing terms). The only trouble is really on Firefox and any other browser that wants to implement a built-in H.264 decoder, but nothing stops them from working around that via things like OpenH264 or by using system decoders and so on.
The same will likely happen with H.265/HEVC, as the recently published licensing terms made it completely royalty-free to use the format itself (including for commercial purposes, you have to pay royalties for that with H.264), and you only have to pay to distribute decoders & encoders.
Personally I wish browser vendors would just use whatever's installed on the user system for playing web videos, but for some reason that's not okay because "we need at least one unified always playing format for the web!" and then we don't get that anyway, as the whole WebM mess has clearly shown...
Anyway, since imgur is doing the conversion to video by themselves, there's not really any reason why they couldn't do both H.264 MP4s and VP8 WebMs... supporting only one format makes more sense if you allow direct user-encoded video uploads like 4chan does with its WebM support for example. Gotta say I don't like this whole "hey we took HTML5 video with 'autoplay loop muted' properties and branded it GIFV!" shtick, though.