G+: Younger brother introduced me to GIFV, which is …

David Coles
Younger brother introduced me to GIFV, which is Imgur's intended replacement for GIF. Unsurprisingly, it's not actually an extension to the GIF format, but rather a mixup of WebM/h.264 and HTML5 video.

Kind of strange to have a format that's not actually a new format, but it does solve an actual marketing problem.

See also: http://superuser.com/questions/868605/whats-the-easiest-way-to-save-a-gifv-as-a-simple-gif

Introducing GIFV – Imgur Blog
(+1's) 1
Matt Giuca
Cool idea, a marketing-based file extension.
James McGill
I think it serves a purpose - basically to indicate that this is a video that should autoplay, loop, and contains no audio.
David Coles
Well, I guess it's no worse than GIF being the "graphics interchange format".
Technically more of a container format than an actual video/image format, but I can see how people may see them as one and the same. Would be completely plausible for something like VLC to playback these files for instance.
David Coles
I guess this shouldn't have surprised me, but since .gifv is HTML (not just a MP4) it can also be full of other non-video content like Javascript and analytics tags. Awaiting the first .gifv-based worm.