Linux AVIF Support: Tutorial

AVIF

Alliance for Open Media developed AVIF as a way to compress images without sacrificing quality. It is considered by experts to be a significant development in the field of media compression. AOMedia uses open, royalty-free technology to deliver multimedia content, ensuring that no fee will be charged to use the new AVIF format. Netflix, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are some of the most important companies worldwide that support AOMedia. As of this writing, JPG and PNG are the most commonly used image formats on the Internet. A few years ago, Google introduced WebP, an image file format that takes up 30% less space than JPG, while maintaining comparable image quality. The size of AVIF images has been reduced by 50% compared to JPG images, without compromising quality.

Linux

Linux is a free and open-source operating system developed by American software engineer Linus Torvalds. Linux is one of the most popular community-driven computing projects in the world, with most of the maintenance of the Linux ecosystem being driven by the GNU Group. Linux's source code is publicly available for the public to read, edit, and contribute to. The installations users download and apply to their systems are called distributions or distros for short. Linux is truly customizable, since not applications, such as word processors and web browsers, can be changed. Running on 2.3% of all desktop devices, Linux is the third-most-popular operating system globally behind Windows & macOS, even beating out Google’s ChromeOS.

Linux AVIF support

Currently, Linux does not support viewing AVIF images. As of September 2021, there are no public plans for AVIF support to be added to Linux any time soon. Despite this, members of the Linux community have created third-party image viewers that support AVIF. Image viewers like nomacs and XnView MP. Moreover, plugins like novomask’s AVIF plugin allow Qt and KDE-based applications to read and write AVIF images. KDE-based applications include the Krita illustration app and the Plasma desktop environment. Linux-supporting browsers like Mozilla Firefox have finally added full AVIF support, allowing Linux users to view AVIF images and sequences on the web.

We use cookies for our services.
OK