New Image Format Will Soon Get Browser Support

Written by AIM Services on 27 July 2020. Posted in Blog

In 2015, a new image format was born of a collaboration between Cisco, Google, and Xiph.org. Dubbed AVIF, the format is based on the Av1 video codec.

It is royalty-free and widely regarded as the most highly optimized image format to be developed to date, superior to old standbys BPEG, PNG, and even the newer WebP.

Netflix rolled out support for the AV1 video format in 2018, even before the new standard was formally approved in February 2019. Microsoft gave the format another significant boost in May 2019 when it incorporated support for the AV1 format into Windows 10 and made it available in a video codec on the Microsoft store.

Taken together, these companies' ready acceptance of the new format prompted companies that make a variety of video playback software to follow suit, setting the stage for easy acceptance of a new image format with a similar pedigree.