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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

1. How does one say that webm is the de facto standard? It’s common but not so ubiquitous that it can’t be replaced easily.

2. AVIF is a better codec with better compression, bit depth and hardware decode support.

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I think OP is referring to the container than the codec when they talk about .avif and .webm - https://www.webmproject.org/docs/container/ (e.g. MP4 or MKV are container formats that support multiple codecs within them like OPUS, AVC, HEVC, AV1, mp3 etc).

1. It's VERY common, sometimes pretending to be a .gif file. Many major image hosters are serving .webm even if users upload gif files.

2. AVIF is not a codec but a container. Webm also can contain AV1 video (but usually contains VP9). Also, difference between VP9 and AV1 is not that huge to be noticable on small gif-like animated pictures

If it has better hardware decode support, why are there complaints in another thread that a folder full of avifs would slow a computer to a crawl? I'd expect hardware-accelerated decoding to be smooth and efficient.

Hardware acceleration requires your device to have the requisite hardware support. Unlike AVC or HEVC, hardware support for AV1 has been quite limited and only recently has seen a slow uptick (for example, Intel CPUs now offer AV1 hardware decoding). Not sure if Apple supports it yet though. But yeah, if it requires special hardware support to be "smooth", in my mind, it is clearly inferior to its competitor codecs that work fine with software decoding (i.e. running on the CPU).

How do we know those people have both a system with hardware support and a decoder that uses it.

Without specifics of hardware it’s hard to know.

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