Netflix has released an updated image file format called AVIF or AV1, which it believes could be the new replacement for the 27-year-old JPEG .
Netflix has the AVIF framework open sourced for others to make it stand out from other formats in terms of speed and compression efficiency.
Although Netflix is in the business of streaming video, the company has plenty of images to squeeze into its menus on TVs, phones, tablets, laptops, and live streaming devices connected to TVs.
JPEG originated from the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which is developing a new JPEG specification called JPEG XL. However, over the past two years, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla Firefox , and others have been developing AVIF simultaneously.
Other formats that AVIF competes with include the Google-developed WebP format, which is supported by Android, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and of course Google Chrome. WebP emerged from Google's work on the VP8 video format. Netflix engineers note that WebP lacks the flexibility of the JPEG 2000 format, although the format is more efficient than PNG in some cases.
Then there is HVEC – High-Efficiency Video Coding, the successor to H.264-Advanced Video Coding, which is supported on iOS and MacOS Apple’s
Like HVEC, AVIF allows for the embedding of AVI intra-frame coded content.
Netflix Netflix postedhassomescreenshots comparing the superiority of AVIF over JPEG and otherformats .While says that AVIF can offer excellent compression performance, the AVIF effort is still in its early stages of development. However, the Alliance for Open Media is developing the libavif library for encoding and decoding AVIF images.
“ We will likely test AVIF images on Android” Netflix engineers note soon , .
