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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

AVIF? The war was lost when Apple set the default iPhone photo format to HEIF. You can't compete with that.

Apple is on the AOM board, and introduced HEIF before AVIF even existed (HEIF shipped in 2017 in iOS 11 and macOS 10.13, the first AVIF images were published late 2018, and the format was finalized early 2019).

Apple has also shipped AVIF support in iOS 16 and Ventura, and AVIF-enabled Safari in the same.

HEIF support was never enabled in Safari. Still isn't.

There is no war. HEIF support was mostly a way to optimise storage on iPhones.

Not even Safari on iPhone supports HEIF. Compare HEIF support with AVIF support: https://caniuse.com/?search=heif, https://caniuse.com/?search=avif.

I don't see this changing either, most browser vendors are going to decide that AVIF is good enough and not pay to license the HEIF patents from the MPEG group.

AVIF lives inside an HEIF container, too.

To add a bit more detail, both AVIF and HEIF use the same file/container format: ISO Base Media File Format¹ — a.k.a. "ISOBMFF", ISO/IEC 14496-12.

ISOBMFF is also used for MPEG-4, AV1, etc. If nothing else, the world appears to have settled on a flexible, extensible container format that can support any future media formats we can come up with.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format

Your HEIF are insignificant compared to JPEG.

HEIF can't compete while being bogged down by patent licensing costs.

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