What I'm interested in is seeing how this will improve the AVIF image format. AVIF stomps the competition for low-bitrate still images (where chroma subsampling is used). For lossless images, not so much. Lossless JPEG XL and lossless WEBP make lossless AVIF look like a joke.
AVIF is for sure my favorite image format right now. No other format has the quadfecta of lossless, HDR, transparency, browser support. Plus as you said, for very compressed images it looks amazing. It blows my mind how small AVIF files can be. Also, unlike HEIC and Ultra HDR JPEG, it actually supports HDR natively as part of the file format rather than doing the hacky sidecar gain map trick. I know it doesn't matter to everyone, but I just love HDR and AVIF is the only format that I feel like really takes it seriously.
>but I just love HDR and AVIF is the only format that I feel like really takes it seriously.
JPEG XL would like a word.
loading story #48344430
loading story #48344907
I really don't.
1. Lossless AVIF is a joke often beaten by WebP and even PNG. Even worse for grayscale.
2. Chroma subsampling remains a bad idea for still images unless the resolution is high enough to hide the artifacts.
3. Tooling is the worst part, AV1 encoders are basically focused 99% on video and leave a measly 1% to image; unlike JXL, of course. SVT-AV1 still doesn't do YUV444 and libaom was unusable. Fortunately, the unpaid enthusiasts were here: https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/the-multimedia-renaissanc... (and more recently https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/oavif/)
I don't see AVIF being used for lossless, which is the largest reason I'd prefer JXL to win: one codec to rule them all sure is an alluring future.
Maybe libavif will pick up AV2 support, so all one needs to do is update it to v2.0.0 or something and bam! Extra efficiency!
Honestly AVIF2 is the last thing we need now. There are way too many minority image formats already.
loading story #48343842
loading story #48346818