Oavif: Faster target quality image compression | Hacker News Reader

Oavif: Faster target quality image compression

giannirosato.com

Thanks for posting this, really interesting!

I've been building a wordpress plugin that converts JPEG to AVIF on the local server (since everyone wants to sell a service to convert in the cloud).

As a photographer who wants high quality photos on their portfolio website I love how AVIF respects color more the webp.

https://github.com/ddegner/avif-local-support

Very cool use case! 4:4:4 support + 10-bit color make AVIF very compelling here.

Super cool! I wonder if the same technique could be useful for video encoding too.

AVIF adoption is still lagging behind unfortunately. Even GitHub and GitLab didn't enable it yet despite pending feature requests.

I mean to be fair writing is on the wall some when a superior format like jpegxl exists but is arbitrarily held back purely because Google's Chromium team wants to push the format they made over the format another Google team worked on.

Superior in file size, image quality, computation required for equivalent quality encoding, no arbitrary resolution caps, progressive decoding which also lets you create 'thumbnails' or resizes by just cutting the byte stream, while also having features to help legacy jpeg files benefit from newer compression losslessly. The only benchmark avif bests at is abhorrently low quality levels that no one genuinely uses.

Which format are you saying the Chromium team made and wants to push in favor of jxl?

webp

Which is superseded by AVIF anyway.

Not for lossless; webp is a fantastic replacement for PNG there. Not so much with AVIF, it's sometimes even heavier than PNG.

How will AV2 based AVIF compare to PNG?

All of that is pretty moot and not something I care about much as long as it's better than JPEG. Let everyone support AVIF and stop this perpetual bikeshedding.

AVIF already works in all browsers, all sites should support it.

I'm a big fan of JPEG XL, but even its most dedicated fans have given up the argument that it is the best for compression efficiency. AVIF's generational leap took place in August 2024 with Tune Still Picture in SVT-AV1-PSY, so much so that Google integrated it into their own encoder and has done very impressive work optimizing it further for the human visual system. JPEG XL's strongest quality is its featureset; lossless JPEG recompression, for example, is really incredible

>but even its most dedicated fans have given up the argument that it is the best for compression efficiency....

I will need to double check. I think even after PSY JPEGXL still excel at BPP 1.0+, and that is 85% of all images served according to Chrome. AVIF is still winning on below BPP 0.8.

Anyway we only have to wait a few more months to see AV2. Let's hope finally they have everything ready.

My theory was that strategically, Google wants to make AVIF ubiquitous to promote adoption of decoders for it in mobile devices; AVIF losing to JXL is a "whatever" on Google's part, but AV1 losing to H265 means another decade of royalties for YouTube.

Good. These files in a format that I can't easily manipulate with existing tools are a major hassle. Stay with GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

Existing tools really just need to do a better job keeping up.

They do. It must be some kind of bad tools that don't support AVIF still.

What tools? Imagemagick handles avif fine converting to and from it. Gimp as well. There is also basic avifenc.

Tools I wrote long ago.

You can add AVIF support then.

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