Depending on your use case WebM is also worth considering

Like, for example:

• Much better compression (it's astonoshing what 21 years of additional research&development can achieve)
• More than 256 colors (again, 1989 tech vs. 2010 tech)
• Support for actual media player controls
• Audio-Support
• Webpages can load and display a small thumbnail, instead of having to load the whole damn thing (very much appreciated when i'm somewhere with a small bandwidth).

On a sidenote: If i were to do some sort of "show not-really-funny videos snippets all day long one after the other" platform(*), i'd most likely choose .m3u8 + .ts. Easy enough to dynamically create to m3u8 text files and (god forbid) even add a 5 second advertisement every few minutes into the stream.

(*) Let's call it "Flip/Flop" or something ;-)

Depending on your use case WebM is also worth considering...

My use case is to extract a short section of a video and display it in an email. I've not researched it but I suspect WebM will be less supported in email clients than GIF. For emails, especially for Outlook for desktop, we have to write very ancient-looking HTML code.

Before you do this: have the intended recipients of the email explicitly asked for this embedded video? I would hate for you to undertake a lot of work to accomplish this and then for the recipients just to go "Oh, some chopper has sent me an email with an embedded video. That's getting binned right this second." and delete it without reading it. Because that's what I would surely do. :-)

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have the intended recipients of the email explicitly asked for this embedded video

The recipients have agreed to receive emails - not specifically ones with a linked image

We already send this kind of email but "manually" create the GIF using an online tool. The reception is pretty good. Such emails have a much higher response rate than usual and an almost zero unsubscribe rate.

Several companies - notably BombBomb and Loom - make products specifically to do this. Both are very good but we don't want to pay the price they charge for the volume of video emails we send.