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Comment by lonjil | Hacker News Reader

Lossless AVIF is just really quite bad. Notice that how for photographic content, it is barely better than PNG, and for non-photographic content, it is far worse than PNG.

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It's so bad you wonder why AV1 even has a lossless mode. Maybe lossy mode has some subimages it uses lossless mode on?

It has lossless just to check a box in terms of supported features. A bit like how JPEG XL supports animation just to have feature parity. But in most cases, you'll be better off using a video codec for animation, and an image format for images.

There are some user-level differences between an animated image and a video, which haven't really been satisfactorily resolved since the abandonment of GIF-the-format. An animated image should pause when clicked, and start again on another click, with setting separate from video autoplay to control the default. It should not have visible controls of any sort, that's the whole interface. It should save and display on the computer/filesystem as an image, and degrade to the display frame when sent along a channel which supports images but not animated ones. It doesn't need sound, or CC, or subtitles. I should be able to add it to the photo roll on my phone if I want.

There are a lot of little considerations like this, and it would be well if the industry consolidated around an animated-image standard, one which was an image, and not a video embedded in a way which looks like an image.

Hence why AVIF might come in handy after all!

I believe it is more fundamental. I like to think that AV1 entropy coding just becomes ineffective for large values. Large values are dominantly present in high quality photography and in lossless coding. Large values are repeatedly prefix coded and this makes effective adaptation of the statistics difficult for large integers. This is a fundamental difference and not a minor difference in focus.

> Large values are repeatedly prefix coded

You mean exponential golomb style, where numbers like 0b110100101 would be encoded as 00000000110100110 (essentially using 2 bits per bit)?

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