AVIF Has Landed | Hacker News Reader

AVIF Has Landed

jakearchibald.com

51 pointsvvoyer14 comments

While AV1 has high complexity and requires a lot more computation power to decode, AVIF picture is essentially just 1 Frame. At the bitrate used with Internet pictures, I would assume decoding power wouldn't be a problem even on Smartphone.

Cant wait to see how it compares to JPEG-XL.

I think we can forget about WebPv2 which is just VP9. I dont see its value when we have AVIF already.

WebPv2 isn't just vp9. It has many features that target image delivery on the web. I think it's worth waiting and seeing what it's like.

This is awesome! Love the equal size comparison. I've wrote a few years ago an article about BPG which also had support for animation - https://eek.ro/why-bpg-will-replace-gifs-and-not-only/

Does AVIF have any support for animations?

Glad to finally see an royalty-free format starting to get traction.

Yeah, AVIF supports animations, but I haven't tried it yet, and don't know the state of implementations. In general, I'm not that excited by anim-image formats, I just go for the video format in that case.

Doesn’t PNG technically support animation, too? It’s just that no one implements it?

It's pretty well supported https://caniuse.com/apng

Interesting. I remember (a few years ago) finding out about them through Wikipedia and that I would need a Chrome extension to use them (they had an example). So, I installed it to view it, but I never saw any other usage of it outside of that page/article.

I guess there’s not really much space savings[0] over an animated GIF even with an optimized PNG and max compression. It does explain why WebP is replacing GIF though[a]: being a video format, it can compress much better.

Off topic: Is YouTube still using VP8? Or have they switched to AV1 (the basis of AVIF)?

[0]: https://corydowdy.com/blog/apng-vs-webp-vs-gif

[a]: The popular GIF sharing site Giphy actually uses WebP if your browser supports it. Otherwise just browsing their site would use hundreds of megabytes (which isn’t good for mobile users with a data cap)

Yeah, MP4s are the tool to go now, especially since you can autoplay them almost anywhere (I'm looking at you Apple).

But still, we still can't use them in mail yet. So having an image to play is definitely interesting - for email - for now.

> 'Effort' 10 (which I used for images in this article) can take over 10 minutes to encode a single image.

Well, there's always a trade-off.

The WebP at near the same size as AVIF preserved more of the dark road texture, but for the more saturated parts the AVIF had more edge detail. I'd like to see more examples to see what types of detail/textures AVIF favors dropping vs line edge details it preserves.

Try it with your own images on Squoosh.app

Here's something related from the same author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1kYBnY6mwg ("Image compression deep-dive")

How is this made to work in browsers that don't support avif yet (i.e firefox)?

edit: Is it WebAssembly drawing on a canvas?

Yep! The end of the article covers some of the details.

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