Video background Happy workaround

i everyone,

Since our planet is running down on cooling, it may be time to think about changing to better web practice and less

bandwidth greedy manners…

Since most of my webdesign’s (links under the form) based on video background, I’m afraid I’ve got to think my way out of this somber perpective, cause I don’t want to come back to still images, find lotties rather childish.

is there anyone out there who has already crossed the line ?

best regards

a.

Using gif stitched images (even converting video to gif) have come a long way and at times even comes across like a video with a fraction of the size or energy-usage footprint, but…

Having been a client of the carbon-offset industry for nearly 15 years I have become very jaded of all the perpetrated misinformation, pseudo-science and price gouging that it has become! The real issue at hand is the polluting of the Earth and the eye-popping destruction of Earth’s native forrest that uses the CO2 for its food source… on a side note, CO2 is heavier then O2 so it is found more at ground level.

Bringing back our world forrest and caring for the ocean would be the BIGGEST factor in bringing Earth’s temperature back down that we human’s have caused. But remember natural climate change is always in the background and us humans have no control over that even if we think we can act as gods!

Hello :wave:t2:

I am glad to see that I am not the only one concerned about bandwidth and climate change. It is indeed a very important topic!

Unfortunately, GIFs are very heavy, especially for a background image, and will, I think, be heavier than a similarly quality MP4 video. :confused:
There is no miracle solution, the only thing I can recommend is to see if you can convert your video into a lighter format and/or lower its quality.

Personally, I do not find sites with fixed backgrounds “childish”. On the contrary, I find them more sober, prettier, less visually aggressive, and offer a better experience thanks to a faster loading speed. But that’s just my personal opinion.

If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, you can also choose a more eco-friendly web host. That’s what I did a few days ago. I switched to PlanetHoster, one of the most eco-friendly according to my research. It’s a bit more expensive than the one I had before (LWS) but it seemed important to me to support these kinds of companies rather than companies that don’t care about the environment.

1 Like

Thanx FlaminFig, it’s very enlightening, and you must be right, we are so littlissimi !

Gif is indeed an option but I’m rather considering a way to let visitor choose between two version of a same website, one with vidz, the other, well… without.
but how?

Thanks Allan, (once again)
You’re right, a fair web hosting is a way to lighten my footprints down there.
I was thinking of giving visitors the choice between a video version and a “light” version but I’m afraid it means a lot of work.

“Childish” was about the popping twirling swinging exploding way some sites behave (but I might be old school :wink:

best regardz

1 Like

I use video backgrounds in places, but I always use ff-Works to try and generate a super-low-fi, high CRF (constant rate factor) movie first, and I keep the loops short. This one is a bit extreme, as the source material is from decades ago, but the video file size is less than 2MB:

https://www.videoverite.tv/pages/policetapes/
(It’s the view-from-the-rear-seat video behind the main film title)

The main takeaway for me is that it’s worth trying very low quality rates in ff-Works as it does a pretty amazing job even at those settings. If you can also possibly change the role of those background videos a bit, to act only as more-abstract moving backdrops, you may be able to stay with an .mp4 loop while dropping the served file size a lot.

Feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to know more about the settings I found that worked, but you can’t go wrong (and will spend less time) if you test using a short (5-10-second) ‘test strip’ video and see how they turn out. Good luck!

1 Like

Many thanks Antonygravett,
I’ll try ff-works as soon as possible.