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AVIF kinda needs hardware decoding, because otherwise it’s considerably more expensive than the traditional codecs. Even with hardware decoding, I’m not sure if AVIF is actually faster/chaper—compared in https://jpegxl.io/articles/faq/#%E2%8F%A9speedfeatures, “AVIF” takes 7× as long as libjpeg-turbo to decode, and I don’t believe hardware encoders tend to bring that big a performance difference over software, but I’m really not sure.

AVIF reduces the amount of traffic required, but will tend to consume more power. This is the general compression tradeoff.

(Other formats often have hardware decoding support too, incidentally. But a lot of the time they’re ignored as too much effort to integrate, or buggy, or something.)




> AVIF reduces the amount of traffic required, but will tend to consume more power. This is the general compression tradeoff.

Mobile devices on battery are connected wirelessly, so traffic consumes a lot of power. The faster the radio can power back down the better, so CPU time is usually a worthwhile trade.


You kind of ignore the case where almost every device is going to do AV1 hardware decoding (which very much appears to be the trend), if that is significantly faster/cheaper battery wise then AV1 still has a big advantage. Comparing single-core software decoding speed seems like a benchmark designed to make JXL look good, not something that actually matters.

> AVIF reduces the amount of traffic required, but will tend to consume more power. This is the general compression tradeoff.

Again, you seem to be ignoring hardware decoding. Dedicated silicon can be many magnitudes more efficient than doing something in software. To take an extreme example with a ton of effort into the efficiency: look at mining bitcoin on a CPU vs an ASIC. I'm not saying the difference will be that big, but it may well be worthwhile.

As to buggy/too much effort/cost of hardware, that's precisely why it makes sense to piggy-back on AV1, a format that already has a lot of incentive to implement in hardware, and the work already done to make it work well. You need that kind of compression for video, and people are putting in the effort to make it work well, so AVIF gets that effectively for free.




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