AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding | Hacker News Reader

AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding

netflixtechblog.com

18 pointsel_duderino11 comments

It's a cool coincidence that this came up just when I was considering how to create more space in my disk.

I have around 20GB of image files from my old graphic designing projects. It's 20 GB now because 2-3 years back I had gone on a similar "spring cleaning" of my drive and converted a lot of image files to JPEG2000 format (mostly lossless). At first I tried to do the conversion with MacOS Preview, but it kept hanging / crashing as it couldn't handle some of the large files.

Luckily, I came across the free J2K Photoshop plug-in - https://www.fnordware.com/j2k/ - that offered more features than Preview's JPEG2000 export did, and was also faster.

This time, I am debating whether to convert all these JPEG2000 image files to HEIF. I experimented in converting a 166 MB TIFF file using Preview. The JPEG2000 (lossless) output was 16.9 MB. The HEIF (lossless) output was 8.9 MB!

But Preview still seems to be buggy with large files, and it got hung in converting a huge image file (around a GB). (I tried GIMP but it crashes too while converting huge files). Another issue I noticed with Preview conversion to HEIF is that it doesn't use the original profile (if any) embedded in the image file, and converts it.

So I am looking for a good HEIF converter that also retains profiles.

Ofcourse, I am still debating whether it would be wise to convert to HEIF.

Choosing and converting to JPEG2000 was an easier choice as it is a standard and has been around for a long time. And there are softwares that still support it.

After all, 10 years down the lane, you don't want to be stuck with a file format that you can't even open! Between HEIF and AVIF wonder which one will outlast the other?

AVIF is open source so it doesn't matter if nobody supports it. Just clone the source of a decoder, and you have the source forever. But, obviously, Google, Netflix, Mozilla, and others have all committed to supporting AV1, and that means AVIF, by extension, will be supported for a long long time.

AV1 is even getting hardware-based decoding support.

That is reassuring in some ways. But it isn't as simple as that - https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2013/01/is-jpeg-2000-a-prese... ... even JPEG2000 is a standard and has an open source implementation.

Buy 2x 32gb USB drives (2 for redundancy). Probably cost you $15 USD. Chuck your 20gb of images on there, then forget about ‘em?

Whether you are using pen drives or memory cards (both not suitable for long term backup) or archival disks, it makes sense to compress your files if it can reduce the size by more than 50%.

heif_enc (or heif-enc if Homebrew) from libheif offers lossless and maintains profiles. I saw the same 50% reduction versus TIFF.

ImageMagick convert still damaged color profiles (refuses to write them, afaict?), as of a month ago.

Thanks. Will check this out. But I suspect if it will work properly on some of my files - GIMP also uses libheif and the HEIF plugin that uses it kept crashing on some of my huge image files.

I only tested it up to ~60MB TIFFs, not sure, sorry.

I noticed a strange issue with GIMP libheif plug-in - some of the converted images look a little washed out (any such noticeable colour change is ofcourse, unacceptable). But macOS Preview converts them perfectly without any such colour difference. I suspect libheif to be buggy.

I only had success with the command-line utility. Attempting to use libheif embedded in other tools did not succeed. I assume this is because the other tools implemented libheif before it supported ICC and have not kept up with the times.

I've been playing around with AVIF for a few months, and I've been impressed that it's about twice as efficient as JPEG. I can't wait to see how JPEG XL compares to it, and to have web browsers support one (or both).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com