Isn't It Time for AVIF Everywhere?

(michaelponders.com)

29 points | by speckx 1 day ago

11 comments

  • remix2000 10 minutes ago

    Does AVIF carry the same patent risks as full/motion AV1?

    (I’m not saying I support the claims or not, I have no idea about their technical and let alone legal merit, just thinking that there are attempts at enforcement against sites streaming AV1 and whether choosing AV1 puts say my site at risk)

    • kasabali 43 minutes ago

      > Even YouTube is preparing to move beyond AV1 and begin streaming video using AV2, potentially as early as 2027. If a company handling the enormous amount of video that YouTube does sees the benefits of a more efficient format, shouldn't the rest of the internet be taking a closer look at what we can do with images and video too?

      Odd argument.

      Image isn’t video and we are not YouTube.

      • d2kx 36 minutes ago

        not an odd argument. AVIF is based on AV1, so what they mean is that since we accept YouTube's AV1 usage as mainstream nowadays, so should be it's image part

      • simonw 52 minutes ago

        Only just started habitually using WebP...

        I added AVIF support to my personal image resizing tool recently - https://tools.simonwillison.net/image-resize-quality - I mostly use that for screenshots though, and WebP works better for those.

        • sampullman 27 minutes ago

          Have you tried Google's jpegli encoder? I find that it generally matches webp for most image types. Quantized png is usually best for anything with a limited color palette though.

          • TurboSkyline 32 minutes ago

            > for screenshots though, and WebP works better for those

            Interesting! Better in terms of more quality preserved or smaller file size? Have you found other types of images where this applies?

          • 0x_rs 33 minutes ago

            Enough keyframe-based "image" formats, please! The internet and the world at large needs a real and proper modern format, not some quick hacks from bored engineers that only contribute to the endless fragmentation online and do not leverage any existing infrastructure for serving video. There's more than just crappy ultra-low-quality thumbnails around. WebP, AVIF are the webscale equivalent of serving images.

            • nwah1 1 hour ago

              Regular JPEG can also be compressed much more than it usually is:

              https://symbiogenesis.github.io/DotJpegli/

              However, video would matter so much more than images, to the overall internet, that images don't even matter by comparison.

              • i80and 48 minutes ago

                It's pretty frustrating that JPEG encoding generally got stuck with libjpeg-turbo.

              • thekid314 1 hour ago

                Absolutely agree, for my photo portfolio website AVIF allows me to serve higher quality photos faster to potential clients.

                I’ll just drop my AVIF local support for Wordpress plugin here: https://github.com/ddegner/avif-local-support

                • origini 1 hour ago

                  Yeah why not?

                  Because whenever I download an image and its webp, the next thing i do is i google "webp to png/jpg" conversation because yeah service XY or Tool Z doesn't support it.

                  Or my Fire TV Stick :(

                  I configure my nginx to serve everything available though. Thats what i can do.

                  • flerchin 54 minutes ago

                    Maybe a middle out compression is the way to go.

                    • BorisMelnik 45 minutes ago

                      I swear I saw this exact post here on HN last week

                      • DivingForGold 1 day ago

                        Seems about time we have ANOTHER round of serious investigations into collusion in the memory industry artificially driving up prices ...

                        • Don't you mean JPEG XL?

                          JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases

                          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50120224

                          • anilgulecha 1 hour ago

                            Jpeg-XL's key win was only lossless translation of existing jpeg to a modern format. Mostly for archives where you don't want a lossy translation.

                            In terms of picture quality for given size, AVIF has it solidly beat.

                            • mort96 1 hour ago

                              You could make an argument that we should have AVIF everywhere on the web. But if you want a single image format to be everywhere, I think JPEG-XL is just better suited. AVIF has restrictions on resolutions and number of planes, and doesn't do lossless very well. It's competitive with AVIF on lossy image quality (even though yes, AVIF does seem like it tends to consistently have the advantage there).

                              • anilgulecha 1 hour ago

                                Image formats goes in era, and there's no need for monoculture. But given we're talking exabytes of data, for this era, the author rightly articulates why AVIF should win. Should JPEGXL2 beat it in the future then it can take over for a decade. We seem to essentially have gone through like 4 formats so far: gif, jpg, PNG and webp. On vector side, SVG has no real competition - it's solid.

                                • mort96 57 minutes ago

                                  The author is explicitly arguing for an AVIF monoculture. AVIF isn't an appropriate format for an image format monoculture, but JPEG-XL could be.

                                  "We should use AVIF for most web images" is a different statement which I have no problem with.