What is AVIF?
AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an open, royalty-free image file format for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF container format. It was developed as a part of the AV1 video coding format by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). It offers improved compression efficiency with better image quality than existing formats and there is a growing number of programs that support it natively.
The features of AVIF
AVIF has been supported in ISO Base Media Format File Format and defines the maximum image quality with the selected profile:
- AVIF Baseline profile for images with up to 8K resolution (when used in AV1 this corresponds to the level 5.1 or lower).
- AVIF Advanced profile for images with up to 16K resolution (when used in AV1 this corresponds to the level 6.0 or higher).
AVIF has the following features:
- Multiple color spaces, including HDR (High dynamic range), SDR (Standard dynamic range) and color space signalling via CICP (Coding-independent code points) or ICC profiles (International Color Consortium).
- Lossless and lossy compression.
- 8-, 10- and 12-bit color depths.
- Monochrome (alpha/depth) or multi-components.
- 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4 chroma and RGB subsampling.
- Film grain.
AVIF Support
| Software type | Name | Since version |
|---|---|---|
| Web browsers | Firefox | 93 |
| Chrome | 85 | |
| Opera | 71 | |
| Android Browser | 100 | |
| Opera Mobile | 64 | |
| Chrome for Android | 100 | |
| Firefox for Android | 99 | |
| Samsung Internet | 14.0 | |
| Image viewers | XnView | 0.96 |
| gThumb | 3.11.4 | |
| ImageMagick | 7.0.25 | |
| IrfanView | 4.56 | |
| Media player | VLC | 4.0 |
| Image editors | Paint.net | September 2019 |
| GIMP | 2.10.22 | |
| Krita | 5.0 | |
| Other | PHP | 8.1 |
| Exiftool | 11.79 |
