Oavif: Faster Target Quality Image Compression

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

computerbuster

44 points

20 comments

giannirosato.comTechstory

calmpositive

Debate

30/100

Image CompressionAvifVideo Encoding

Key topics

Image Compression

Avif

Video Encoding

The post introduces Oavif, a faster alternative to AVIF image compression, sparking discussion on its potential benefits and comparisons to existing image formats.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

Peak period

8-10h

Avg / period

2.2

Comment distribution20 data points

Loading chart...

Based on 20 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Oct 12, 2025 at 12:21 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Oct 12, 2025 at 6:05 PM EDT
6h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
4 comments in 8-10h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Oct 13, 2025 at 11:35 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (20 comments)

Showing 20 comments

shmerl

3 months ago

2 replies

AVIF adoption is still lagging behind unfortunately. Even GitHub and GitLab didn't enable it yet despite pending feature requests.

miladyincontrol

3 months ago

4 replies

I mean to be fair writing is on the wall some when a superior format like jpegxl exists but is arbitrarily held back purely because Google's Chromium team wants to push the format they made over the format another Google team worked on.

Superior in file size, image quality, computation required for equivalent quality encoding, no arbitrary resolution caps, progressive decoding which also lets you create 'thumbnails' or resizes by just cutting the byte stream, while also having features to help legacy jpeg files benefit from newer compression losslessly. The only benchmark avif bests at is abhorrently low quality levels that no one genuinely uses.

vinkelhake

3 months ago

1 reply

Which format are you saying the Chromium team made and wants to push in favor of jxl?

free_bip

3 months ago

1 reply

webp

shmerl

3 months ago

1 reply

Which is superseded by AVIF anyway.

homebrewer

3 months ago

1 reply

Not for lossless; webp is a fantastic replacement for PNG there. Not so much with AVIF, it's sometimes even heavier than PNG.

shmerl

3 months ago

How will AV2 based AVIF compare to PNG?

computerbusterAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

I'm a big fan of JPEG XL, but even its most dedicated fans have given up the argument that it is the best for compression efficiency. AVIF's generational leap took place in August 2024 with Tune Still Picture in SVT-AV1-PSY, so much so that Google integrated it into their own encoder and has done very impressive work optimizing it further for the human visual system. JPEG XL's strongest quality is its featureset; lossless JPEG recompression, for example, is really incredible

ksec

3 months ago

>but even its most dedicated fans have given up the argument that it is the best for compression efficiency....

I will need to double check. I think even after PSY JPEGXL still excel at BPP 1.0+, and that is 85% of all images served according to Chrome. AVIF is still winning on below BPP 0.8.

Anyway we only have to wait a few more months to see AV2. Let's hope finally they have everything ready.

remexre

3 months ago

My theory was that strategically, Google wants to make AVIF ubiquitous to promote adoption of decoders for it in mobile devices; AVIF losing to JXL is a "whatever" on Google's part, but AV1 losing to H265 means another decade of royalties for YouTube.

shmerl

3 months ago

All of that is pretty moot and not something I care about much as long as it's better than JPEG. Let everyone support AVIF and stop this perpetual bikeshedding.

AVIF already works in all browsers, all sites should support it.

userbinator

3 months ago

2 replies

Good. These files in a format that I can't easily manipulate with existing tools are a major hassle. Stay with GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

computerbusterAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

Existing tools really just need to do a better job keeping up.

shmerl

3 months ago

They do. It must be some kind of bad tools that don't support AVIF still.

shmerl

3 months ago

1 reply

What tools? Imagemagick handles avif fine converting to and from it. Gimp as well. There is also basic avifenc.

userbinator

3 months ago

1 reply

Tools I wrote long ago.

shmerl

3 months ago

You can add AVIF support then.

thekid314

3 months ago

1 reply

Thanks for posting this, really interesting!

I've been building a wordpress plugin that converts JPEG to AVIF on the local server (since everyone wants to sell a service to convert in the cloud).

As a photographer who wants high quality photos on their portfolio website I love how AVIF respects color more the webp.

https://github.com/ddegner/avif-local-support

computerbusterAuthor

3 months ago

Very cool use case! 4:4:4 support + 10-bit color make AVIF very compelling here.

paulbgd

3 months ago

Super cool! I wonder if the same technique could be useful for video encoding too.

View full discussion on Hacker News

ID: 45559372Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 1:08:48 PM

Want the full context?

Jump to the original sources

Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.

Open link View on HN