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Is AVIF the WEBP killer?

Is AVIF the WEBP killer?

With MacOS Ventura now supporting AVIF natively. We need to give this file format the attention it deserves. AVIF is a new open source and royalty free file format.

An AVIF image offers file size reduction compared with JPEG, PNG and WebP and is currently supported on Google Chrome, Firefox and Android.

AVIF in depth
AVIF stands for "AV1 Image File Format". In it's core it is the specification for storing still and moving images compressed with AV1 in the HEIF file format. AV1 is the new royalty-free video coding format that everyone in our field thinks is the next step in media compression.

AVIF generally has better compression than WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF and is designed to be better than them. It competes with HEIC which uses the same container format, built upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019.

Big tech is loving AVIF
In December the first .avif samples were published by Netflix, also support in VLC was added. Microsoft also announced support with their Windows 10 "19H1" preview release, for most of their apps and programs. Paint.net added their support in 2019 and a year later the support to save in AVIF format. The Colorist format converter and Darktable raw image editor have each released support for the libavif library, and a GIMPs plugin implementation has been developed providing support for both 3.x and version 2.10.x API.

So as you can see/read, the big tech companies are all welcoming AVIF with open arms.

If you want to know Netflix's opinion on this development, check it out here https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-coding-b1d75675fe4

AVIF Features

  • High dynamic range (HDR)
  • 8, 10, 12-bit color depth
  • Lossless compression and lossy compression
  • Monochrome (alpha/depth) or multi-components
  • Any color-space including wide color gamut, ISO/IEC CICP, and ICC profiles
  • 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4 chroma subsampling
  • Film grain

Now obviously you would like some examples and comparisons, so i would highly recommend checking out this blog: https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/.

Ofcourse at the time of writing we at RunningWombat have fixed our support for AVIF so you will now be able to convert the file however you want. For example, PNG to AVIF: https://runningwombat.com/png-to-avif

Or find our other tools at https://runningwombat.com/image

I really hope you found this blog post helpful and i will talk to you in a next blog.

Let me know if you have any questions at rowan@runningwombat.com

Cheers, Rowan