Using WebM instead of Gifs to improve your blog’s speed
Convert MP4 files easily with free web services or using FFMPEG locally
A few days ago, I wrote a step-by-step tutorial on my personal blog, about how to create a CAD model for a macro pad.
It was a very visual guide, with several short animations: I wanted to illustrate how to do each step of a process.
Those high-resolution screen recordings from my computer screen occupied between 4 and 40 Mb each, for a total of 497 Mb. Too much to embed them on a website.
My initial thought was to use GIFs to display the animations, but GIFs are not really a good file format for high compression without quality losses. There are other options, such as WebP and animated PNGs, but I discovered that video formats are much better than any of those.
So in this short story, I want to tell you about the benefits of using video formats instead of GIFs and how you can do that in different ways.
Embedding video files directly is not currently supported by Medium, but this is definitely something you should consider if you have your own website, in order to improve it’s loading speed.
