Mastodawn

R.L. Dane

🍵

May 13, 2025

YES!!! #AVIF #FTW!!!

Just FYI, nsxiv, imv, and swayimg all support AVIF as well, although imv did oddly have a glitch with one of the images I tested it with. I'd never seen that happen before.

According to some people I've spoken with, JPEG is still king for high-fidelity images and minimizing loss upon re-compression, but AVIF just totally whips the llama's posterior when it comes to relatively high fidelity at crazy low file sizes (high compression).

AVIF is often noticeably better quality than #WebP at the same (low) file size and resolution, and parsecs beyond what JPEG can do with high compression factors.

If only the fediverse supported it!!! :(

We barely have WebP support (mostly on #GtS, maybe #snac (haven't tried it)), not on #Mastodon.

Adam May 13, 2025

@rl_dane Yes, I just never got around to adding those. I'll add it to my list of todos.

Yeah it is unfortunate with the lack of support for AVIF. I've found I've been able to use WebP on Fosstodon and is what I stick to for now. AVIF I use for large images on my website at least until I get Inkscape to export to AVIF.

Huh! I didn't realize mastodon supported WebP. That's great!

It's not as good as AVIF, but it's considerably better than JPEG for low-quality, high-compression images.

Adam May 13, 2025

@rl_dane It is great. I agree. Hopefully AVIF will take off more.

Ann Effes May 13, 2025

Here is my Version:

Step 1: Install VLC 4 or better (DevVersion) on your device.

Step 2: Done.

Adam May 13, 2025

@Ann_Effes I'm sorry I do not follow. The only VLC app I know of is a video media player not an image viewer. Maybe there is another app called VLC I'm not aware of.

No, I am talking about the VLC you know, which also is an audio player and image viewer ( which many people do not know). Give it a try.

@Ann_Effes Really, well version 3 doesn't allow images. I'll take a look at version 4 dev then. This is the first time I've heard of it capable of this feature.

https://wiki.videolan.org/Image

Are you certain?
I am running V3.0.18 (so not even the latest) and it displays .JPG and .PNG files and many others (even WebP). But not all. Interestingly it does support BPG but not HEIC and - till V4 - not AVIF.

And since the Image demuxer is doing that, this should work on all platforms VLC is running on.
So if it does not work on you machine your VLC installation may be corrupted or the like.

One oddity, however is, that VLC does support .GIF, but does not play the GIF animation, but instead shows the first frame only

@Ann_Effes Yeah, the GIFs I tested don't play the animation. It seems to treat images as video media.

"This is the first time I've heard of it capable of this feature."

Yeah I know, a bit of an obscure Feature. I learned that by accidend some years ago. AFAIK it was partly supported since V2 and officially since 2018 / V3.0

@Ann_Effes Well thank you for pointing this feature out. While testing I opened jpg, webp and gif without issues. The only issue I see thus far is it treats it as an item to play rather than to view. So a list of media to play like a slideshow. As a result it doesn't display metadata, resolution, basic image manipulation, etc. Though current media info can help.

https://www.lemkesoft.de/produkte/graphicconverter/

True. VLC is for images just a rough and quick way to view a pic - not much more.

On macOS my tool to do more is btw. GraficConverter

In case you do not know it:

This app reads/converts/writes virtually EVERY image format which is out there, is also a basic image processing tool, knows all the details (resolution/color-room, full EXIF with EXIF tool, sizes etc.etc.) can do resizing, recompression, cropping, dia-shows, batch manipulation....

GraphicConverter