Videos are much more efficient than apngs or gifs, though, and it's just as easy to allow downloads (unless they're using variable bitrates which are a bit pointless for short animations anyway)

It's just as easy to allow downloads, but it seems a lot more common for sites to go out of their way to disallow video downloads than gif downloads. Also a bunch of them use video tags that don't point to an actual video file but get fed video content out of band.

I'm "guilty" of this on my video site https://pushups.ndn.today (does not work on iOS). So far one person figured out how to download those videos, after spending 4 hours studying my source code.

I've got to imagine that comment as leading to a honeypot; what I heard "prove you're a good hacker by downloading video from my site".

This is the web nerd equivalent of sitting next to a petrol-head at the traffic lights revving your engine.

(Are we talking about Reddit's terrible videos?)

I would have expected them to have fixed the obvious issue with their UI by now.

> I would have expected them to have fixed the obvious issue with their UI by now.

Are we talking about the same Reddit that still runs three different versions of their website because the newest version is so bad that people refuse to use it? I'm not holding my breath.

I did mentally facepalm after I wrote that.

They seem to be following the 'ooh shiny' philosophy of software development.

Unless they have a loop indicator in the file it's not a GIF replacement.

Most messaging platforms/chatrooms won't autoplay video. Which in the context of quick "reactions" doesn't work well at all.

That's just using the blob API likely. Nothing stopping you src'ing an <img> tag with one of those.

If the page you're on can survive a reload, you can often find the interesting mp4/m3u8 request in the devtools network tab. You probably knew this already.

I just tried it on Imgur and was able to right click -> "Save video as". But yeah, I have seen a lot of more scummy sites do what you described.

I have seen a few overlay empty divs over an image/video. Very frustrating behavior.

That's hardly new, though. Flickr has been doing that for ages.

I've kind of expected that you have to open the DOM inspector to find image links these days. Not sure what they think they're protecting, but the protection doesn't work.

(Reminds me of sites that disable pasting in passwords from your password manager, so you have to have xdotool type them for you. Again, not sure what they think they're saving me from. And I'm not sure why browsers have APIs that allow this sort of thing.)

The protection is not against people like you. It's for the average joe.

Knowing how to use the dev tools makes you like a 1% in the world. And blocking out 99% with a simple div or something is a pretty good ROI

Such simple protection works even for developers if they use smartphone because navigating DevTools on smartphone is complex task.

Yes this was one of the reasons I built gif.com.ai - GIFs are a special format and my intention for the app was to retain a gif as just that. When you generate a gif you get an Imgur copy and it sometimes formats the gifs to videos but that’s not a problem because you can get the original gif format back by adding “i” in the url prefix and adding “.gif” to the end of the url.

Images and videos can both be downloaded by right click. Also, both of them can be configured not to work that way by html/css structure. It's not a difference between image vs video.

But then you might be able to re-share "their" content without subjecting your friends to that website's ads and that website's tracking (but I repeat myself)

Maybe it's time to make a service that transforms those videos back to GIFs, like the services that expand tiny urls...

Who will pay the bandwidth bill? Long gifs are enormous

Who pays for all the (free) gif service's bandwidth anyway?...

For the same quality, the videos take a lot less space then the gifs though... Also, you can unblock the right-click blocking

It's not a file format problem, it's a user experience problem. I can't save a Twitter "GIF" and share it without resorting to external tools like youtube-dl.

It's not a file format problem, it's a developer/company problem... They didn't implement it correctly. I can download videos on many sites by right clicking on them. They could "block" right-clicking on GIFs too if they wanted to.

Shift+right click sometimes works. Anymore I just let youtube-dl handle it.