[yeqdizon] Short animations

There is an important qualitative difference between short animations (short movies) and long animations.  Short ones can be used anywhere an image can.  There is never "I regret spending the time to watch this."

What is the boundary between short and long?  Seems to be about 5 seconds, thought it would be nice if there were a principled way of determining the number.  Maybe the time it would have taken to use the UI to fast forward to a desired time point in the movie.

This space is currently filled poorly by Animated GIF.

Create a program, probably a browser plugin, that detects whether an embedded movie is short, and if so, plays it on infinite loop.  Perhaps only permit movies with no sound.

Perhaps play longer movies at faster frame rates, as a preview until the user chooses to slow it down.  What is the (effective) frame rate of LCD displays?  How fast can frames be shown while still having a good chance that every frame will be visible and accurate for some period of time?

A trick on LCDs might be to play every Nth frame of an M frame animation in infinite loop, where N and M are relatively prime (pad if necessary).  Then every frame eventually gets shown.

Create a method that a browser can handle a page with a great many animations without lagging or gobbling up tons of memory.  (We don't even have this for still images.)  This probably requires keeping the data in compressed form in memory / disk cache and only decoding and rendering when visible.  It might require reprocessing animations with large screen area, perhaps in the style of the GIMP tile cache.

Previous vaguely related: Short animations would be fine for a terminal.
Evaluating other people's assessments of porn can be done quickly for short movies.