Changelog for February 2021

Conversion speed

As you know, the conversion speed for AVIF is a little bit painful. Indeed, other than the lack of progressive loading, it's the only thing we have a problem with when it comes to embedding AVIF images onto our web projects. This makes it even better that Xiph keeps improving its AVIF encoder, rav1e. The Xiph Foundation claims rav1e is the safest and fastest AVIF encoder online. The company always updates its code which proves its ability to speed up the conversion process every time. We are glad to announce, that we successfully implemented the latest version 0.4.0 successfully. It provides solid speed improvements on both x86_64 and aarch64. The overall speedup is solid across the speed levels, both for 8bit and 10bit encoding. With some drastic improvement for aarch64 on speed 10. Inluded, but not limited to:

  • Improved 4:2:2 support (37% reduction in encoding time, 0.8% to 5% improvement to coding efficiency)
  • Thread CDEF loop filter with tiles (1.2% reduction in encoding time with 4 tiles)
  • Enable open partitions on frame boundaries (2% improvement to coding efficiency)
  • Substantially rework initial motion estimation (9% reduction in encoding time)
  • Optimize chroma quantizer offsets for 4:4:4 sampling
  • Reduce memory allocation count in various areas
  • Allow frame sizes <16x16 in still picture mode",

If this doesn't say much to you, here's a tldr: Your conversion process is ~15% faster now. And yes, we are keeping a close eye to the already released 0.5 Alpha version.

Website performance

We discovered that our website had become unaccessible a few days ago. Great! A chromium/Chrome update has changed some ways web workers did their job. Ours just couldn't handle the change and users on Chrome and Opera were unable to convert any images. We also had some severe issues with Safari. However, all of these issues are now fixed. If you still experience anything unusual, feel free to write us at [email protected]. Besides these fixes, we have made some changes to the code splitting behavior so that the overall website performance increased.

Usability

Based on an analysis of 500 Hotjar recordings and reading more in depth about several topics, we've made several changes for the common user, to improve accessibility and SEO.

  • higher use of semantic elements and aria attributes
  • added JSON data for better search engine results
  • linked Sitemap in footer
  • Created a tooltip for the settings panel so people notice it more
  • Added a new progress indicator to support visually impaired people
  • Cancelled conversions will disappear after a short period so they don't take up space.
  • If the conversion fails, you will be asked if we can use your image for further testing
  • Moved image slider upwards on our homepage
Profit from a faster website, higher ranking and better conversions.
Convert your images to AVIF for free.
We use Google cookies for our services.
OK