[HN Gopher] AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding
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AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding
Author : dedalus
Score : 75 points
Date : 2020-03-09 03:29 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (netflixtechblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (netflixtechblog.com)
| rytill wrote:
| I don't see compression speed / performance / time mentioned
| anywhere in the article.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm guessing that Netflix compares not at all about compression
| time for this; the most used assets are probably downloaded
| millions of times and change rarely.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| And honestly if you're not designing a camera then there's
| extremely little chance you care about still image
| compression time.
| gok wrote:
| That 420 vs. 440 comparison animation is rather problematic. GIF
| can only represent 256 colors. Most of the artifacts in those
| images are due to GIF-specific dithering.
|
| also, previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22327480
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Should have used apng, sure, but the _difference_ is still very
| visible on those hard color lines.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I'm going to put my cynical hat on for a bit and notice that the
| company behind this format, Netflix, has a walled garden. They
| have a streaming service that is consumed _only_ through a
| handful of apps that they are in full control of. They 're not
| doing this for the community, for web standards, or the greater
| good. They're making this format simply to save some bandwidth
| for themselves, in a way that won't translate to the general
| community. The second picture in the linked blog article is
| literally a diagram of this garden. (Titled: _" Compressed image
| assets destined for various client devices..."_)
|
| I had a similar comment about the JPEG XL format (mostly
| developed by Google) and the CSS "Display P3" colour space
| extension (Apple), both recently featured on YCombinator. These
| mega-corporations are building an ecosystem where in 2020, _the
| future_ , it's impossible to send a wide-gamut, 10-bit, or HDR
| still image to anyone via any of the following: web standards,
| chat, email, or document exchange formats. The best you can do is
| send an 8-bit SDR sRGB image and hope for the best. PC monitors,
| tablets, and most phones have no _consistent_ support for colour
| management, 10-bit, or HDR. Televisions are leaving the entire PC
| _and_ Mobile ecosystem in the dust. The closest approximation we
| PC peasants have is to upload a HDR YouTube video, send a link to
| it, and hope the viewer uses an newish iPhone. That 's just sad,
| isn't it?
|
| The stewardship of web standards by Microsoft (#2 biggest
| company), Apple (#3), and Alphabet Group (#4) have led to this.
| Now Netflix (#50) wants to throw their unnecessary format into
| the fray, almost completely ignoring the presence of JPEG XL and
| HEIC. They mention these alternatives in passing, and then
| notably don't compare image quality, features, or the compression
| ratio of those to their own format. You see, JXL is a _Google 's
| thing_, HEIC is an _Apple thing_ , and AVIF is a _Netflix thing_.
| So we 're going to end up with as many image formats as there are
| walled gardens. I bet you too can't wait for whatever image
| format Facebook comes up with specifically to reduce their CDN
| bandwidth utilisation of Instagram pictures... only.
|
| Notice also that their "idea" of making an image format readily
| available is a _docker container_ , which is the most insane
| thing I've ever seen. Where's the Photoshop plugin? The Lightroom
| plugin? The Windows 10 image codec? Oh wait.. those are _Adobe
| and Microsoft things_ , so... nowhere to be seen. Netflix Pty Ltd
| is not in this game to help someone _else 's_ walled garden.
|
| No still image interchange for you peasant! Sit down, stay in the
| garden, and stream that content...
| oconnore wrote:
| Shouldn't this be benchmarked against WebP instead of (obviously
| much worse) JPEG?
| mkl wrote:
| It _is_ benchmarked here against WebP, HEVC, and JPEG2000, as
| well as JPEG. That 's what all the graphs are. AVIF wins quite
| convincingly on the metrics they've used.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Or indeed HEIC.
|
| A lot of so-called "next generation" codecs are really
| "current-generation" now.
| roca wrote:
| Benchmarks against HEVC and WebP are included in the metrics
| section of the article.
| berkut wrote:
| Does any browser support HEIC yet? To my knowledge, even
| Safari doesn't.
| daef wrote:
| or flif... https://flif.info/
| roca wrote:
| It's been a slow process, and hence perhaps underappreciated, but
| it's very gratifying that over the last 15 years patent-
| unencumbered media codecs have won. The companies that
| contributed to this --- Google, Mozilla, Cisco, and others ---
| and especially Xiph that got the ball rolling --- deserve a lot
| of credit.
| threeseed wrote:
| H.264/H.265 is the standard for video today.
|
| Not sure where you're getting that idea that open codecs have
| won.
| jasondclinton wrote:
| It depends on what you are measuring. If we go purely by web
| traffic volume, then whatever YouTube is doing is what's
| "won". AFAICT, that's VP9 to everything that supports it
| which seems to be all desktops and new Androids but not Apple
| devices. Android devices of the previous generation fallback
| to VP8 where there's hardware decode support.
| greggman3 wrote:
| They have? Are we talking images only because in video mp4 and
| .h264 and .h265 are pretty much it. Apple/Safari still doesn't
| support vp8/vp9/webm/av1 for video or ogg for audio
| jasondclinton wrote:
| Mobile Safari is about 20-35% of all mobile web traffic.
| Desktop Safari is about 5-15% of all desktop web traffic.
| Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
| est31 wrote:
| > Are we talking images only because in video mp4 and .h264
| and .h265 are pretty much it. Apple/Safari still doesn't
| support vp8/vp9/webm/av1 for video or ogg for audio
|
| h265 is doomed because of the multiple patent pools that have
| formed and the extreme price hikes compared to h264. It's a
| risky technology to build on. That's the best ad that AV1 can
| have, and many members joined the alliance for open media for
| that reason after it became clear that the patent pool
| situation wouldn't resolve.
|
| As for your browser support question, yes, Safari has
| traditionally been anti-ogg, but a few years ago Apple joined
| the alliance for open media and added opus support to their
| browsers (although only in the caf container, for some weird
| unexplainable reason).
|
| Open codecs have won in the lossless audio domain (flac).
| There is no reason they can't win in the lossy video and
| lossy audio domains too (not sure about lossless videos but
| FFV1 seems to have lots of support by archivists who want
| open technology).
| reggieband wrote:
| I worked on a team responsible for image assets. I recall the web
| team asking for webp support from our image server. I suppose
| nowadays using `srcset` you can get some optimization in the
| ratio between file size and quality while still providing
| fallback for unsupported browsers. Given our image service was
| dynamic (e.g. it generated then cached images at different sizes,
| qualities, etc from a single high-res source) adding a new format
| wasn't that difficult. It meant that the image heavy pages would
| display more quickly which was a concern especially for mobile.
| So I am a big supporter for more and better formats.
|
| That being said, this AV1 vs. HEVC / AVIF vs. HEIF stuff feels
| eerily similar to HLS vs. DASH. It's not like these formats have
| drastically different properties (e.g. GIF vs. JPG vs. PNG) -
| they are all quite similar. I just want to fast-forward time
| until whichever one is going to win is standard. It's like VHS
| vs. Betamax or Blueray vs. HD-dvd. Please just get it over with.
| MikusR wrote:
| The difference is that HEVC/HEIF has at least three different
| patent licensing organizations that all want to be paid. While
| AV1/AVIF is supposed to be "patent free"
| reggieband wrote:
| I heard the same about h.264 vs VP9 and it turned out that
| patent licensing wasn't a long-term issue. For a while you
| got that license from Flash (if y'all remember when Flash was
| the way Youtube worked, and I recall mention that it was one
| of the primary reasons Flash Player was never opened
| sourced). Then the license for h.264 it was included in every
| copy of Windows 8 (IIRC). Nowadays no one even mentions the
| h.264 license.
|
| I'm no expert on the new license but it seems the
| restrictions on HEVC are relatively light. I'm pretty sure it
| is free to compress and distribute media but the license
| affects hardware and software encoders/decoders. So maybe
| your HEVC enabled video card with built-in decoder will be a
| dollar more expensive. I know that every Apple device shipped
| comes with HEVC hardware standard for the last few years. I
| would wager most Android devices too.
| niftich wrote:
| From English Wikipedia article "Advanced Video Coding",
| with cited sources:
|
| _" The commercial use of patented H.264 technologies
| requires the payment of royalties to MPEG LA and other
| patent owners. MPEG LA has allowed the free use of H.264
| technologies for streaming Internet video that is free to
| end users, and Cisco Systems pays royalties to MPEG LA on
| behalf of the users of binaries for its open source H.264
| encoder."_
|
| (...)
|
| _" On August 26, 2010, MPEG LA announced that royalties
| won't be charged for H.264 encoded Internet video that is
| free to end users.[74] All other royalties remain in place,
| such as royalties for products that decode and encode H.264
| video as well as to operators of free television and
| subscription channels.[75] The license terms are updated in
| 5-year blocks.[76]"_
|
| [74] "MPEG LA's AVC License Will Not Charge Royalties for
| Internet Video that is Free to End Users through Life of
| License" (PDF). MPEG LA. August 26, 2010. Retrieved August
| 26, 2010. http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20Li
| st/Attachme... [75] Hachman, Mark (August 26, 2010). "MPEG
| LA Cuts Royalties from Free Web Video, Forever". pcmag.com.
| Retrieved August 26, 2010.
| https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368359,00.asp [76]
| "AVC FAQ". MPEG LA. August 1, 2002. Retrieved May 17, 2010.
| http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx
| threeseed wrote:
| This is why H.264/H.265 are dominant today. Because end
| users aren't exposed to licensing.
|
| I can freely record video on my Sony camera and watch it on
| my iPhone, Mac, PS4, Switch etc.
| izacus wrote:
| No, HEVC licensing is an insane mash of several patent
| pools and a few companies trying to extract a buck out of
| anyone that uses it. It's significantly less clear and more
| complex than what H.264 was and the license fees are higher
| as well... If you even have a legal team that can figure
| out who needs to be paid.
|
| I'm on the phone so I can't really look up all the
| resources, but they shouldn't be hard to find. But this
| licensing mess is also why most oss development stalled and
| we still don't have an encoder that would be anything close
| to the quality of libx264. Instead, most important OSS
| experts have moved on to AV1.
| londons_explore wrote:
| As far as I can see, there is no support in any web browsers yet,
| despite the format being finalized a year ago... Whats the
| holdup?
| niftich wrote:
| AVIF support Firefox issue [1]; Chromium issue [2].
|
| [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1443863 [2]
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=960620
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| For some weird reason browser manufacturers strongly oppose
| adding support for any new media formats. They will only
| accept a new format once _they_ decide that 's a good
| political move. If I were Google/Mozilla I'd add support for
| everything ffmpeg and imagemagick support.
| londons_explore wrote:
| As soon as they support something, they can never drop
| support for it because some sites will have started using
| it, and some sites will never stop using it. Look at how
| hard it has been to deprecate Flash.
|
| By enabling support, they are commiting to maintain same-
| or-better compatibility pretty much forever. Thats a big
| commitment if your code is based of someones 'for lolz'
| patch to ffmpeg...
| shmerl wrote:
| Why use HEIF container for AVIF, instead of something derived
| from Matroska for example, like WebP does? Is HEIF free to use?
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