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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox now supports the new AVIF image format

PARTY!

I've been waiting for this for a long time. The last big hurdle for this was that color spaces weren't applied correctly.

If you haven't taken a look at AVIF, do. You can get a similar looking image in AVIF at half the size as a JPEG. I find AVIF's image artifacts preferable to JPEG's.

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I'm looking forward to the wide adoption of JPEG XL (.jxl - "jixel") file format. It's the format that will replace JPEG!

https://jpegxl.info/

I kind of doubt it. JPEG is good enough, and is pervasive. JPEG XL is better, but removing an incumbent file format requires more than just being better. We'll see.

Unlike preceding formats that tried to replace JPEG, this one was designed with the replacement challenges in mind.

A great blog post on this by one of the creators of the format, Jon Sneyers:

https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_deth...

JPEG XL has a party trick where you can losslessly transcode JPEG files to JPEG XL for a ~20% size savings. I imagine that every CDN out there will enable transparent conversion of JPEG to JPEG XL and that will drive adoption just by itself.

Dropbox quietly replaces the insides of JPGs with a better compression system (lossless change) to save their storage costs, and then returns it to normal when the file is read. (It may be they do a JPEG XL transform, for all I can remember about the article which explained it).

I wouldn't be too surprised if every big CDN already does something like that internally as a competitive advantage, and if so then the incentives switch around and there's no benefit publically switching to JPEG XL - when everyone has it, there's no easy way to do better than everyone else.

Aren't the biggest costs from bandwidth, not storage? I'm sure they would love to reduce data transmission by 20% for browsers that support it.

CDNs would love to bill customers 20% less for bandwidth used? Customers will be able to move to storing JPEG XL files on CDNs and reduce their own storage and bandwidth costs, but I was responding to the claim that it would be in CDN's interest to hurry the transition, and I think it will be a loss for CDNs.

JPEG XL supports a recompression and bit-perfect reconstruction of JPEG(1) files, so once it got universal support it does have the biggest potential to completely displace JPEG.

It's already in Firefox Nightly and Chrome Beta as far as I know.

It’s available to turn on in Chrome 94 via Chrome://flags

For Firefox you need the nightlies I believe - I had no luck with release Firefox 93.

It's pronounced "jizzle".

That's unfortunate since 'jizz' is slang for semen.

Downvoters, it's true! At least in British English.

In Yinglish (Yiddish-English) jizzle would mean something like 'a drop of seamen'.

Oy...those poor <picture> tags will soon be just stuffed with different file formats as we try to accommodate all browsers.

Worse... When you are forced to support IE11, and keep limited to the old good JPEG.

At least, JPEG-XL offers a solution on this side, like store as JPEG-XL and serve as old JPEG to IE11 users. Now, if only there was a JPEG-XL implementation for Java...

isn't AV1 also a contender for that as a lossy compression algorithm?

Firefox 93 doesn't seem to support animated AVIF images. I have few AVIF examples animating correctly on Chrome 94 but only showing stills on Firefox 93.

Edit: I found few examples here: https://colinbendell.github.io/webperf/animated-gif-decode/a...

What is really odd is that if you go to the AVIF Wikipedia entry animation isn't even listed as a feature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#AV1_Image_File_Format_(AVI...

When people were comparing it to GIF I specifically tried to check if it supported animations, but came up with little.

From that link:

> AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF file format.

Oh wow! I hope firefox eventually provides support for this.

Speaking of AVIF, I wonder why Microsoft Edge doesn't support it while the matching version of Chrome does.

https://libre-software.net/avif-test/

I've found AVIF's spec to be massive and overly complicated to implement in its entirety. Four years later, ffmpeg doesn't even support AVIF/HEIC encoding or decoding yet, despite those formats arguably becoming ubiquitous thanks to Apple.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/6521

Do you know when we can expect .heic?

If you mean the container format, AVIF uses it natively.

If you mean the image format, probably never. It's based on the HEVC/H.265 licensing minefield. For that reason, I don't expect it to ever be supported on Chromium or Firefox based browsers.

Hmm, I have no issues viewing the files (iPhone pictures) on my Ubuntu desktop, are they that much braver?

Yes. You probably have the extra codecs package added which is arguably illegal to distribute in the US. Other distros like Fedora won’t touch it.

I thought that .heic has patents on it and is thus not free in some cases. Which I think is an overwhelming reason to bury it and not use unless you have a very good reason to.

Having fewer browsers support .heic format would be a benefit -- as it would decrease the chances of the format surviving.

Hmm, I really like live photos(the moving pictures of the iPhone) and the advantages that brings. Damn, Apple got me again. I'm going to read up on advantages of Heif and maybe set up script in Nextcloud to auto-convert, so I do have a free format of all my pics.

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