Rant follows:
@ Itnetlolor, your avatar, an 80 pixel by 45 pixel picture, is 1.8 megabytes. Do you not think that is excessive? Do we really need to know that Tex kicks that much ass?
@ Tilla, same. 1.7 megabytes.
I don't mind seeing big, pretty pictures of Minecraft creations. I like them. I don't mind the size of those pictures.
But tiny, muddy full-motion video clips that you can't even make out what's happening? In an extremely wasteful file format not ever intended for holding FMV?
I can do without those.
Give me some credit. I optimized it as best I could to retain quality (fps, # of frames, and overall detail so you can still tell black from dark grey (not bad for 256 colors either)) while keeping it small enough to load up quick enough. Compared to most other lengthy animating avatars, I say mine is still within average size. I just slightly overshot the width of the avatar (which also contributes to the filesize), somewhat intentionally just in case it can be used elsewhere, and still not lose quality at a larger size or shrunken down slightly (like this case).
I would advise a rant like this should be in a thread of it's own. I only say so because this can derail this thread rather easily with others in agreement to either side, and potential flame wars. Not what anyone would want to happen.
As for my avatar, I found this scene humorous in just how it was executed. Like the tagline, that's how you think with portals. Plus, I was getting bored with my old one. BTW, compared to past FMVatars I've had, this one isn't even the worst offender in my collection. Actually, this is one of the most tame ones. It's the 2nd smallest lengthy animating avatar in my collection. The fractal ones I had were way worse when it came to time and size (2.8mb).[/rant]
EDIT:
Right, 120x68 are it's original dimensions. 80x45 was what it was losslessly scaled down to (no change in filesize; full-size was shrunken without any alterations whatsoever; IE-scripted reduction via CSS or java), and surprisingly, the reduction improved the quality a bit more (blended any stray pixels better). There are some other avatars which are huge pictures, not reduced previously, that get scaled down and become almost impossible to decipher sometimes, and they don't even animate. I've encountered that problem before, and that's why if I find something I like, or would like to use as an avatar, I manually scale it down and/or crop it so there's no loss in quality when I use it. In regards to gifs, I exploit that to cram in more frames for a smooth animation, or to import FMVs. I generally aim for 1.0x-1.5x avatar size to keep edges clean, and a nice compact file.[/remainder of rant]