What is GIF Video?
A GIF Video (file extension: .gifv) is a video file that is displayed without sound and looping automatically, like an animated GIF. In other words, a GIF Video is literally just a MP4 video file (extension: .mp4), that has a different extension, and that is supposed to be displayed differently by applications that support the concept of GIF Video.
This concept of GIF Video was invented by Imgur, a popular image-sharing website. In the past, video wasn't well-supported by web browsers, so the only way to share a video clip of your favorite show was to save it as an animated GIF. The GIF format (extension: .gif) is extremely inadequate for this purpose. Even small video clips stored as GIF would have immense file sizes. This was an issue for both users who had to wait for these GIFs to download, and for image-hosts that had to pay to store the GIFs.
It wasn't difficult to find GIFs that were 10 megabytes in size, when the typical image on the web would be just a few hundred kilobytes. In many cases, these GIFs would be just a few hundred kilobytes in size if they were stored in a proper video format, because a proper video format can compress video frames using countless techniques.
So Imgur decided to start supporting video uploads, and because this was supposed to replace animated images, which didn't have sound and looped automatically, the uploaded video should also behave as a GIF even if it weren't. They decided to call this a "GIF Video." Another website that had similar issues with GIFs was Tumblr, and Tumblr today also supports the same GIF Video concept, with .gifv extension.
Nowadays, we have better video support in web browsers, including the WebM format.
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