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Chrome and Firefox Are Getting Support For the New AVIF Image Format (zdnet.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
The new lightweight and royalty-free AVIF image format is coming to web browsers. Work is almost complete on adding AVIF support to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. From a report: The new image format is considered one of the lightest and most optimized image compression formats, and has already gained praise from companies such as Netflix, which considers it superior to existing image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and even the newer WebP. The acronym of AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. As its name hints, AVIF is based on AV1, which is a video codec that was developed in 2015, following a collaboration between Google, Cisco, and Xiph.org (who also worked with Mozilla). At the time, the three decided to pool their respective in-house video codecs (VPX, Thor, and Daala) to create a new one (AV1) that they planned to offer as an open-source and royalty-free alternative to all the commercial video codecs that had fragmented and clogged the video streaming market in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
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Chrome and Firefox Are Getting Support For the New AVIF Image Format More

Chrome and Firefox Are Getting Support For the New AVIF Image Format

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  • ARGH!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DarkVader ( 121278 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @05:34PM (#60280702)

    Not ANOTHER one.

    As if that stupid WebP isn't bad enough. JPEG GIF, and PNG are just fine, we don't need another one.

    Smaller image files would have been great - in the '90s. It no longer matters.

    • Re:ARGH!!!! (Score:4, Informative)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @05:37PM (#60280716) Homepage

      Be thankful you don't browse Facebook. They crush every bit of life out of images to save bandwidth. Maybe they'll switch to AVIF and let up a bit.

    • Someone should (Score:5, Funny)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @05:43PM (#60280728)

      Someone should combine all the existing formats into one single new format. Then write an XKCD about it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hazem ( 472289 )

        Someone should combine all the existing formats into one single new format. Then write an XKCD about it.

        My kingdom for an up-vote!

        I suspect the main driver of this is to force obsolescence of older platforms and tools.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 )

      Lossless WebP pretty much made PNG obsolete, not only does it compress much better, it decompresses much faster.

      • not only does it compress much better, it decompresses much faster

        Yeah, that's great... but those of us that have to support images [not as a primary feature] in the products we manage are stuck having to add new, cross-platform support for images entirely too often. It doesn't help that some of them (looking at you, HEIF) are generally a pain to support.

        Is Apple going to get on board with WebP? Would be nice if these big-tech folks could play along nicely with each other so the rest of us don't have to jump through hoops just to maintain compatibility.

        If all of them supp

        • Sorry, typo: Is Apple going to get on board with AVIF?

        • Hey, so I don't have to support images and image compatibility in my work so I'm genuinely curious. What other formats have you had to add support for within the last 3~4 years, besides the already mentioned HEIF obviously?

    • But, but... Choice is good ! Right ?

    • Re:ARGH!!!! (Score:4, Informative)

      by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @07:08PM (#60281104)
      Because they aren't extensible, don't offer good compression ratios, or even image quality for JPEG, don't meet newer image standards, and are generally outdated. Not that AVIF is a good idea, JPEGXL is a royalty free compression scheme created by the JPEG foundation that's specifically designed for still images, unlike AV1, and thus has better compression ratios and image quality, it's also highly extensible.

      But standards being what they are "hey that's good enough" is usually the answer from the implementation guys, no matter how much work or research the people behind compression schemes and image quality standards put in. You just have to be at the right place at the right time, and with two of the three biggest browsers adding support AVIF has already won by default. Don't be surprised to see it in Android, iOS, Windows, and on Safari within a year.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        AVIF will be good for highly compressed stills and animation, but JPEG XL has other compelling features which make it attractive for high quality images on the web. It offers an upgrade path for existing jpg/png/gifs which can be transcoded without loss at reduced size. Images may also be encoded progressively, allowing replacement of multiple images in various resolutions and formats with a single jxl. Truncated images may be fully decoded with more data increasing resolution, making pages more responsive

      • But standards being what they are "hey that's good enough" is usually the answer from the implementation guys, no matter how much work or research the people behind compression schemes and image quality standards put in.

        BSD if one wants the spread of standards.*
        GPL if one wants the spread of code.

        *Want a standard like a stack or image format to be used by everyone, including proprietary?

        Do it once, do it right, and everyone can enjoy the results.

    • Completely agree on this. We wasted time and effort building out WebP that's not even supported by every browser anyways. Now this? AMP was also a waste of engineering talent... I'm a bit sick of these Google projects that just go by the wayside or really are not all they're cracked up to be after investing time and effort into them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xonen ( 774419 )

      In all this mess that the web has been, especially anything related to websites and HTML, the evolution and transition to html5 (with html5 being reasonable clean but anything before that an utter headache), the rise and fall of plugins like flash, the road to support native video in html, the outphasing of FTP to replace it by HTTP, the evolution of javascript...

      In between all this mess you complain about a new image format?

      I do still recall the day that PNG was finally adapted as a new image standard for

      • with html5 being reasonable clean but anything before that an utter headache

        Genuinely don't understand this. XHTML is great - add HTML5 tags and it would be way better. No need to throw out a perfectly well-formatted and infinitely parseable XML to go back to loosely defined SGML.

    • JPEG GIF, and PNG are just fine

      They really aren't. And if they are I suggest you visit an eye doctor which does not use JPEG compressed eyecharts.

    • > JPEG ... are just fine

      FLIF (Free Lossless Image Format) images never lose information when recompressed [flif.info].

      > PNG are just fine

      FLIF: Hold my beer [flif.info]

      * FLIF is 43% smaller than typical PNG files,
      * PNG doesn't support 16-bit images

      Still not convinced [flif.info] ?

      * 10,293,932 bytes for uncompressed RGBA
      * 693,075 bytes for PNG with Adam7 interlacing
      * 657,022 bytes for PNG with Adam7 interlacing after brute-force pngcrush
      * 562,214 bytes for JPEG 2000 (lossless)
      * 533,004 bytes for the original PNG file as found on pngimg.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      JPEG GIF, and PNG are just fine, we don't need another one.

      They really aren't. TIFF might be fine because it supports a lot more, but a lot of the extra tags are proprietary.

      It's not just size that matters, but color space (sRGB is so decade ago - the iPhone 5 was one of the first to have a 100% sRGB screen, while the iPhone 4s before it was 99% (a little blue leaked into the green making it incapable of showing some colors).

      Then there's HDR. And high bit depth (8-bits per channel isn't the be-all-end-all o

  • Because Apple sets the standards.
  • Could we please say whether this codec is lossy or lossless in the summary? Stuff that matters, etc. etc.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      Image and video codecs should be assumed lossy until described otherwise.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jemmyw ( 624065 )
      It appears to support lossy and lossless compression, which it'd have to do to compete with both JPEG and PNG. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#AV1_Image_File_Format_(AVIF)

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @06:55PM (#60281024)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      A bettervquestion world be, is ktbany point, and thevanswer will depend on what format the collection is in as of this moment, and your goal(s) with rhe conversion

  • Wake me up when software can save images as AVIF (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pierre Pants ( 6554598 ) on Thursday July 09, 2020 @07:11PM (#60281114)
    Literally NO ONE you know has any idea about this shit.

    • Literally NO ONE you know has any idea about this shit.

      I wondered the same thing. Apparently a microsoft paint preview and paint.net supports it but wikipedia doesn't know anyone else who does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
      I'm literally off to have a nap.

      • It turns out that XnViewMP supports AVIF. I'm totally uninterested in the lossy compression, didn't try it. I tried lossless, with photos. In general, the files are up to about 15% smaller than WebP lossless (by far the best lossless image format), but check this out: the encoding takes AGES (many times longer), and even more importantly, so does the decoding (also many times slower), and compressing a 20mp image uses 6gb of RAM, 7gb at some point. It's a joke. WebP lossless files are decoded pretty much as

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gTsiros ( 205624 )

          is lossless photo compression meaningful considering no photographic sensor is bit-accurate anyway?

        • Guess use-case is lot fewer decompress/compress - like in long term storage/archival; say of museum/art collections/paintings/books.
        • I don't know about WebP but AVIF is just adding still-image support to what is primarily an algorithm (AV1) designed to compress video.
          AV1 is apparently very computationally intentsive and thus takes much time and resources to compress. It's way costlier than practially all other video compression algorithms. Compression ratios are good and so it might be a good choice for compress-once-play-many-times scenarios like those of Netflix and Youtube (both belong to the group developing the format) but I'm not

  • They'll want their own proprietary format that only works in Mac/Safari and you have to pay them 30 cents per image compressed. Hey if you want to take advantage of the Apple ecosystem they built you have to pay, it's only fair.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      They're FINALLY [apple.com] supporting WebP so who knows.


      Unrelated, I wanted to use # to jump to the relevant part of the page, bu they have multiple DOM IDs with the same name! Good Job Apple!

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This is like when PNG finally became "supported" by everyone. It took half a decade before almost everyone actually had a browser that supported it.

        Safari 14 may support it, but remember that older Macs are stuck on older Mac OS X/mac OS versions and older iDevices are stuck on older iOS versions, so you may want to wait at least five years or so before dropping JPEG/PNG, unless you like pissing off millions of people.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          While I'm not saying to 100% to switch to WebP the day Safari 14 is released, don't Apple devices usually get updated to the latest version quicker than Windows and Android devices?

  • An issue I've run into with webp, especially on mobile - is that while it's faster to download (being smaller), the increased decode time can more than make up for it. Bandwidth is pretty fast these days, and it's not always the case that "smaller file = better performance".

  • According to the AVIF spec, it supports filmgrain. No wonder Netflix is applauding it. Their "TV static" intro. must be the bane of video encoders.
    -----
    Haha, I was previewing the above, about to hit send when I realised I was thinking of HBO, not Netflix. :-)

  • I spend too much time making memes to support a new format that I can't work with.

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