Might embedding HTML5 videos (for example, via H5VIDEO or H5LOOP BBCode tags) become an option at some point? Smaller filesizes / bandwidth usage than gifs, much higher quality, and a lot of sites are going that way. Seems like it would be a win all around unless there are other reasons for not implementing it (content management? Doesn't seem to be a concern with gifs that can be served up from anywhere that supports hotlinking them).