Wrote a few notes on publishing iOS live photos, involving exporting a .mov from iOS and running it through ffmpeg to fix aspect ratio, scale, strip audio, and convert to web-friendly codecs. Taking live photos is a nice alternative to shooting in video mode because you can have them captured by default, so there’s a lot less mucking around with start/stop.

A major takeaway: you can make a <video> behave like a classic animated GIF by having it autoplay and loop, but only by also including the muted option, which browsers require before allowing autoplay to prevent us all from losing our minds.

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline>
    <source src="/videos/girm632/cougar-1.mp4" type="video/mp4">
    <source src="/videos/girm632/cougar-1.webm" type="video/webm">
</video>

playsinline is another magic Apple token that tells an iPhone that it’s okay to autoplay a video.