alt Hacker NewsI think one overlooked aspect is that AVIF is container based. Meaning that once sites support, when AV2, AV3 etc. will come out, there won't be a need to go through another very difficult phase of sites adoption - it will still be AVIF just with newer codec inside, and it will be just up to browsers to catch up on newer versions and newer codecs will address technical needs as times goes.
JPEG XL doesn't have that benefit, while sites adoption is arguably a worse issue than browser adoption.
To demonstrate the point even for AVIF itself - it has been in the browsers for a while. Can you use it on common sites? Good luck if you can, even major sites like GitHub and GitLab have issues with it due to some site code depending on hardcoded list of known formats or other similar problems.
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> I think one overlooked aspect is that AVIF is container based.
Many other image formats are. AVIF uses HEIC, the same container that HEIF does.
> when AV2, AV3 etc. will come out, there won't be a need to go through another very difficult phase of sites adoption - it will still be AVIF just with newer codec inside, and it will be just up to browsers to catch up on newer versions and newer codecs will address technical needs as times goes.
Fingers crossed, but AV2-based AVIF specs haven't even been finalized, so who knows.
This doesn't make sense to me. There's enough content negotiation out there that AV2 will need a new content-type parameter. Feature detection is important to browsers.
The container is useless. Files based on a newer codec won't display anyway.
ISO-BMFF container is bloated and needlessly complicated. AVIF decoders didn't even want to reuse existing MP4 libraries for it due to all the baggage it brings, and implemented their own minimal parsers.
AVIF would have been better off with a simple wrapper similar to RIFF/PNG or extending AV1's own OBU header (which for inexplicable reason gets its data duplicated inside the HEIF container and then implementations are required to verify that both copies agree!)
I hope AVIF will skip AV2. We don't need yet another almost-identical format to migrate to.