Animated AVIF for the Modern Web (arthur.pizza)

Very cool. I didn't know that AVIFs had a full alpha layer, which seems to imply that we now have a format that can do animation AND transparency at reasonable file sizes in all modern browsers.

Perhaps I have a niche use case but I need to display animated images (or video) that has adaptive transparency (meaning the transparent area changes, for example think of a bonfire with smoke as an isolated object).

Previously I was using some Frankenstein setup with old encoders so I could feature detect and serve either WebMs (which have animation+transparency) or Apple ProRes for Safari (because Safari does support WebM, but not the full spec). Frustrating, and a workflow nightmare!

[dead]

I wish avif images had more reasonable computational requirements. I find the format inferior to jpeg-xl but the difference isn’t that huge - both are good enough imo. Sadly a folder full of avif files will make pretty much any consumer cpu in existence chug like mad, it’s completely unusable for actually using those images as an average end user does unless you happen to have something silly like 64 core epyc. jxl is already slower than I’d like, but it’s good enough on a modern machine. avif… isn’t.

What is the advantage of using avif over using an MP4 file?

Why .avifs when we have .webm already? Seems like overcomplicated replacement for already existing de-facto standard.

TIL: AVIF can be nicely embedded and looped like a gif. That's awesome. With most of the video embedding I've seen so far, the issue has always been that it was embedded as a video player.

Sadly you can almost never upload an animated AVIF, WEBP or APNG file anywhere. Not even places that support GIFs or MP4s.

I'm looking at you, Reddit o_O

Great, yet another image format that cannot be controlled by browsers "disable autoplay" setting.

I love AVIF. On websites I always convert larger images to AVIF. I never knew animated AVIF was possible. The only question is, is it supported by all major browsers?