The AV1 image format (short: AVIF) is a royalty-free and open-source picture format. A large number of companies including Google, Apple, and Amazon collaborate on this format since 2019. AVIF offers a considerable feature palette such as 12-bit color depth, HDR support, chroma subsampling, and film grain. It has significantly better compression than older formats such as JPG, PNG, or WebP. AVIF has already gained much attention from companies such as Netflix and it has the potential to be widely adopted as an image format for web delivery.
Some bullet points:
- AVIF is based on the AV1 video codec, which was developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) consortium.
- AVIF uses lossy and lossless compression techniques to reduce the size of images while maintaining high visual quality. It is designed to offer a better trade-off between file size and image quality compared to older formats such as JPEG and PNG.
- AVIF supports a wide range of color depth, bit depth, and pixel formats, including high dynamic range (HDR), wide color gamut (WCG), and film grain. These features enable AVIF to represent a wide range of visual details and preserve the visual quality of the original image.
- AVIF is supported by a growing number of web browsers and image editing software, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Adobe Photoshop. However, AVIF may not be supported by all devices and applications, and it may require additional processing power and memory to decode.