Support AVIF format

[Maxou44]

Hello :)

First of all, I'd like to thank you for this awesome open source project, it's amazing!

In August 2020, Chrome will be able to show AVIF images.

Source: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/2276542

Because libvips already support AVIF format, it could be nice to add this format in weserv project, what do you think?

Have a great day,
Maxime

[andrieslouw]

Will need to check this, thanks for the heads-up!

[kleisauke]

Reading 8-bit AVIF images should already work, see for example:
https://images.weserv.nl/?url=http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/AV1/Chimera/AVIF/Chimera-AV1-8bit-1920x1080-6736kbps-100.avif&output=jpg

However, some AVIF images (with the ftypavif magic bytes) cannot be decoded properly. This requires PR libvips/libvips#1657, which is available in libvips 8.10 (to be released soon).

Writing AVIF images requires some research on our side to see if our servers can handle that. It also requires some minor adjustments to the codebase.

[Maxou44]

Firefox Nightly supports AVIF ☺️

[andrieslouw]

We started some work on this, but it is really beta, and AVIF-encoding will be an uphill battle (consuming lots of resources). We will notify you here if we start testing on images.weserv.nl, for now you can experiment using our code, the support is there as per ac3e355 .

[Maxou44]

It works well, I didn't found a bug on hundreds of images 😍
Really awesome 😎

[mehulmpt]

Thanks for adding support for avif! Any expected timeline by when it could be used on the main images.weserv domain?

[kleisauke]

AVIF decoding should already be supported (live demo). Unfortunately, AVIF encoding is slow and consumes a lot of resources even when rav1e is used, which is why we disabled it in the &output parameter. You might consider using our code to set up your own solution for full AVIF support.

Note that we are considering supporting JPEG-XL, as it is a good competitor to AVIF. However, it is not currently supported within the modern web browsers by default: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl.

[FinnRG]

@kleisauke Apple just announced that they will add JPEG-XL support in the upcoming Safari 17 release (source). It's likely that this will motivate the other browser vendors to improve their implementations as well. Are there any updates regarding JPEG-XL support for wsrv.nl?

[charsleysa]

@kleisauke now that all major browsers support AVIF and it's considered a Baseline 2024 feature, is there any chance of having it supported as an output?

The bandwidth savings compared to JPEG can be quite significant. Using https://squoosh.app, anecdotally I've found a ~20% file size reduction comparing JPEG @ 75 quality vs AVIF @ 75 quality 0 effort and a ~32% file reduction with AVIF @ 75 quality 2 effort.

[kleisauke]

@FinnRG JPEG XL support is blocked on libjxl/libjxl#1450 and libvips/libvips#3132. Furthermore, I would also like to see this being fuzzed in libvips' OSS-Fuzz integration before we enable it on our servers (see commit google/oss-fuzz@890953f for details).

@charsleysa Comment #238 (comment) is still relevant today, see e.g. issue libvips/libvips#2983.

[Blackflexxy]

Will there be support for animated avifs(basically just av1 video)?

[furdiburd]

avif = free, non patented, supported by all browsers, doesn't reduce color variation like webp, smaller image size, and it's the only jpg improvement alternative (supported by all browsers) as reality now as of the spring 2024

I would say that jpeg successor would more likely be jpeg xl. (I know, you manualy need to enable support for that in firefox and need to install an extension for it in chrome based ones)
It supports way more features, like progressive loading (AVIF need the whole image before showing anything), animations like GIF and a good compression (worse than avif in low size, better quality than it in mid-high sizes)