AVIF is a 2019 spinoff from the AV1 video format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Mozilla, Microsoft, Netflix, and Intel. As an open-source and royalty-free video codec, AVIF delivers much higher compression rates than the older image codecs like JPEG and WebP, and is on par with the brand-new JPEG-XL format, which does not work on any browser yet.
I can be quite passionate about image codecs. A “codec battle” is brewing, and I’m not the only one to have opinions about that. Obviously, as the chair of the JPEG XL ad hoc group in the JPEG Committee, I’m firmly in the camp of the codec I’ve been working on for years. Here in this post, however, I’ll strive to be fair and neutral.
AVIF is a new image format for the web. Before I tell you all about it, let me show you what AVIF can do.
One way to compare image codecs is to encode the same image in different formats at matched file sizes and then compare the visual quality of the resulting images. For example, I rendered the AVIF below with a q_50 quality transformation. It weighs 12.3 KB and, compared to the lossless original it looks pretty good subjectively.
Every year in early February, after closing our fiscal year, we discuss the year that was during our monthly All Hands meeting. This year we reflected on a year unlike any other.
It was a year in which the unimaginable became our shared reality. Together, as a global collective, with our families, customers and partners, we Zoomed and pushed and pulled together in ways we had not had to do before.
Fidelity in images is about visually preserving the original; appeal is about hiding the compression artifacts. Depending on your priority, you would compress images with either of these approaches to reduce the file size while still maintaining a reasonable level of visual “quality”: