ShadowHog

Shadow Hog

@ShadowHog

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ShadowHog
@ShadowHog
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@Campster
Sheri
@Sheri

AVIF is the new WEBP

i am sick of new image formats, but i also acknowledge there are plenty still in use that are quite old. if something is "old", that means it needs replacement, right?

...right?

so, what is AVIF and what is it for?

its name is a pretty piss poor acronym, as it stands for, in its entirety: Alliance for Open Media Video 1 Image File Format

who are the alliance for open media? i'm glad you asked.

The Alliance for Open Media

they are a tax exempt non-profit digital advertising & media group governed by many giant tech corporations like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Intel, Facebook, Netflix & more

they were founded with the explicit purpose of creating a new, standardized, "royalty-free" media format for the web, as companies were irritated at paying for licensing for available formats

now if there are some Brands™ i trust with the future of media online it's:

  1. FACEBOOK, who actively lied about how many people were watching videos on their platform, destroying many small creators' livelihoods in the process

  2. GOOGLE, who we really shouldn't be consolidating any more power over online media into, in my humble opinion

  3. NETFLIX, lol. lmao.

don't get me wrong. obviously i want companies which operate the platforms we're all forced to use to give over input about how best to share media online. it's just that i don't trust them to do it themselves in a way that will preserve the ability for copywritten media to be shared outside of those platforms

aside from AVIFs just often not embedding on many platforms, including discord, in the opinion of both me and people who actually understand image compression algorithms, it's simply not enough of a change to really justify upending online media formats, let alone when webp is already irritating enough for artists and programmers to navigate around

remind me, who was it that made webp?

The Wikipedia article for WebP's opening line, reading: WebP is an image file format developed by Google.

oh. yeah.

if google was so insistent on trying to make webp a thing, doesn't it seem weird that they've bandwagon'd onto yet another new format that's trying to replace old ones?

anyways, if something is old, maybe it is a good idea to replace it? which is why JPEG and PNG have been being updated for years

maybe we shouldn't leave big corps in charge of the file format media is displayed with online, is all i'm saying

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in reply to @Sheri's post:

GFD
@GFD

i’ve never been sure what the advantage of AVIF is supposed to be. it’s definitely not the “openness” seeing as EU antitrust regulators are busy investigating the AOM w/r/t licensing. meanwhile, there’s JPEG XL, which should actually be a thing, but Google has decided that it won’t be, because of some internal politics there, even though they helped develop the format. the Chromium issue on the matter has an absolutely massive comment thread from people pissed off about this decision and Google simply do not care because they have no reason to. it is exhausting.

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Sheri
@Sheri

thank you for having good input on this cuz im no expert on image processing formats or digital storage in general.

what i do see is a lot of people saying "these new formats don't change enough to be worth it" and also saying "too much change at once is bad" so like. iunno maybe competitive development of image processing isn't the best way to go??

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GFD
@GFD

i mean JPEG XL is kind of unquestionably actually worth it because it is also just Literally Better JPEG and would make all the JPEGs like 25% smaller with no quality loss. it would save so much bandwidth on that alone, but also it’s just good at everything else too, and truly designed For The Web. AVIF is like, the image version of a video codec for some reason?? it’s not efficient.

yeah too much change causes problems, and you don’t want to have to support too many image formats because more code is more maintenance. most things are still using PNG and JPEG and GIF for these reasons. JPEG XL actually works within this framework though. you can still serve JPEGs if a web client doesn’t support the JPEG XL container for saving bandwidth. and then eventually, when everything finally supports JPEG XL, you can just start using its other features for free! it’s the best way to go about this. but Google has ruined this plan.

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clairem-sl
@clairem-sl

AVIF can only handle images up to 4K resolution. Images larger than 4K will be "tiled" and usually the borders between the tiles are not seamless.

DICOM (images used in medical industry) and my maps are all larger than 4K. AVIF simply won't do.

Also JPEG XL is gradually making its way through ISO, so sooner or later Google will be forced to support JPEG XL.

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