Add AVIF support for images

[Player]

AVIF is currently more optimal than JPG or any other image format, it preserves the image quality by offering a much better compression. I think Valve, if you would add this, both us users and you would benefit of this image format.

[Roxor128]

Is it at least an order of magnitude better than JPEG? No? Then it's not worth the trouble.

This is why WEBP hasn't really caught on. Yes, it's better than JPEG, but not by a wide-enough margin to make it worth switching.

PNG caught on because it was significantly better than GIF. Patent-free, better compression, higher colour-depth, and alpha-channel transparency support. It was so much better for still images that it basically relegated GIF to animation duty.

None of these JPEG-but-better formats like WEBP have anything like PNG's advantages over GIF. PNG had new niches to fill (truecolour and alpha support), and had the dodging of GIF's patent fees as an incentive for developers to include support for it. None of these wannabe JPEG-replacements have those. The only thing they can compete on is compression ratio, and a 20% improvement is just not enough to be compelling.

[Player]

Цитата допису Roxor128:

Is it at least an order of magnitude better than JPEG? No? Then it's not worth the trouble.

This is why WEBP hasn't really caught on. Yes, it's better than JPEG, but not by a wide-enough margin to make it worth switching.

PNG caught on because it was significantly better than GIF. Patent-free, better compression, higher colour-depth, and alpha-channel transparency support. It was so much better for still images that it basically relegated GIF to animation duty.

None of these JPEG-but-better formats like WEBP have anything like PNG's advantages over GIF. PNG had new niches to fill (truecolour and alpha support), and had the dodging of GIF's patent fees as an incentive for developers to include support for it. None of these wannabe JPEG-replacements have those. The only thing they can compete on is compression ratio, and a 20% improvement is just not enough to be compelling.

WEBP is a loossless format, so it's evident why Valve won't implement it. A single picture in 1080p can take a lot of unnecesary space.

I and what you said about the rest... advise you to read the following Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIF

And to inform yourself a bit more about image formats, I will tell you that even HEIF is much more optimal in quality/weight ratio than PNG or even JPEG.

Also, the 8mb file limit would not be a big problem thanks to AVIF as you could upload images in high resolutions, without compression artifacts for less than that space.

[Mailer]

Цитата допису Roxor128:

PNG caught on because it was significantly better than GIF. Patent-free, better compression, higher colour-depth, and alpha-channel transparency support. It was so much better for still images that it basically relegated GIF to animation duty.

That's funny if true because now we've basically come around full circle and have APNG replacing animated GIFs too.

[RiO]

Цитата допису Roxor128:

Is it at least an order of magnitude better than JPEG? No? Then it's not worth the trouble.

https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/

Will you settle for a 75% filesize reduction compared to JPEG at the same perceptual quality level? Aka 300% gains on compression efficiency with AVIF?

Its lossy compression also does so well on 'flat' graphics, that it still looks every bit as good as PNG's lossless compression. Only it does so with a mere fraction of the file size.

In fact, AVIF compresses so freakin' well that its compression of a rasterized version of a non-trivial SVG vector graphic, outdoes the gzip-compressed SVG markup.

Oh; and as AVIF is essentially a single-frame AV1 video it can use hardware-decoding support in the graphics hardware, where it exists. So yeah; it also can save the main CPU a lot of cycles spent decoding the compressed image format.

Цитата допису Sergio:

WEBP is a loossless format

Webp has both a lossless and a lossy mode.

It can also mix and match lossless and lossy encoding for different channels. E.g. a lossy encoding of RGB color information, but lossless encoding of the alpha channel, to ensure crisp edges on partially transparent images.