What does HackerNews think of libavif?

libavif - Library for encoding and decoding .avif files

Language: C

So a few dozen comments, but so far it doesn't look like any mention the immediate thing that jumped out at me which was the claims vs AVIF:

>"In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format."

Huh? I'll admit I haven't been following codecs as super ultra closely as I used to, but I thought AOM was a pretty broad coalition of varying interests and AV1 an open, royalty free codec that was plenty open source friendly? I've heard plenty of reasonable arguments that JPEG XL has some real technical advantages over AVIF and as well as superior performance is much more feature rich and scalable. So I could see people being bummed for that. But this is the first time I've heard the assertion that it's somehow a Google project? I mean, AOM's libavif reference is BSD too [0]? I'd love some more details on that from anyone who has been following this more closely. I can even understand if AOM isn't as community friendly and an accusation that it's dominated by big corps, but in that case why single out Google alone? From wiki:

>The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent.

Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too.

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0: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

Where can one get a linkable library for AVIF? got it: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif
> Look at the robo-dog's left ear!

Not sure how you created those AVIFs. The reference AVIF encoder[0] wants to use 4:4:4 chroma, but it looks like that hero image is 4:2:0. There is a small size hit for 4:4:4, but edges around saturated colors is much better.

[0] https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

I've noticed that too. I've been testing AVIF, and the reference encoder[0] defaults to 4:4:4 (no chroma downsampling) if you don't tell it otherwise. I tried 4:2:0 and it looked horrible, but the size hit for 4:4:4 wasn't bad and looked much better.

[0] https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif