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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

New compressed media formats always travel a decade-long path from either (1) obscurity → contender → universal support or (2) obscurity → contender → forgotten curiosity. AV1 is on one path, WebP is on another.

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As someone who doesn't follow this stuff, which is on which path?

AV1 is on the path to universal support and WebP is on the path to obscurity.

WebP remains fairly esoteric after 15 years, has always been a solution in search of a problem, and isn’t even universally supported in products by its owner.

AV1 was created and is backed by many companies via a non-profit industry consortium, solves real problems, and its momentum continues to grow. https://bitmovin.com/blog/av1-playback-support/

Funnily enough, JPEG2000-support was eventually removed everywhere. I assume the only reason this didn't happen with WebP as well is Google pushing and keeping it in Chrome.

Also the Google's lighthouse benchmark pushing webp recommendations, and people listening to it because of SEO concerns

True. I mentioned JPEG2000 because it had a similar fate, in particular no real reason to use it in the first place.

Apple CPUs have AV1 support in hardware.

So does every modern GPU. This is nothing special.

I think you're arguing the same point—that there's plenty of support and it's arguably growing.

Only support for decoding and from A17 Pro and M3 onwards, I believe? Going to be a few years before that's commonly available (he says from the work M1 Pro.)

[edit: clarify that it's decoding only]

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