Q:

Animated GIF vs. HTML5 video performance in users' browsers

I need to display several items on a page that represent videos.  Embedding video players (even just a couple) causes a ton of load on the user's CPU (you can hear your computer's fan spin up immediately to the maximum speed).  My thought to mitigate this is to generate animated GIFs to represent clips of the videos.  This seems to cause a load on the CPU but not nearly so great.  It seems that once the GIFs have finished loading, the CPU load is less of an issue.
I'm only testing this by putting about 15 GIFs on a page, loading it up in Chrome on my MacBook Air and watching Activity Monitor.
http://yawmp.com/temp/anigif_test.php
Is my logic sound that Animated GIFs require much less CPU resources than embedded videos?  Are there memory issues I should be concerned about?  Are there any downsides to going this route in terms of system resource pain for my users?

A:

If there are a few frames in the animated gif, the browser is just cycling through those frames - that isn't a particularly big deal. The memory issue would become a problem if you put enough of them on a page.
However, that is a lot of stuff moving, flickering and otherwise demanding attention. Maybe you could switch from a static preview image to the animated gif on mouse over so there is a bit less going on at once. Then if it interests them they can click through and load the video.

