AVIF Support (feature request)

[grofaty]

I was inspired by bug #1515365 that is asking for WebP support, that is going to be obsolete and replaced by AVIF format. Probably still good idea to support this image format at least at opening if not at saving stage. More image format it is supported the better.

I have read a lot about AVIF and this is royalty-free image format supported by major big tech companies. Chrome web browser has had this support few years nod and now finally Firefox web browser added support in latest release.

One of the biggest pluses of this image format is around 40% disk saving comparing to JPEG and possibly even better image quality.

There are now plenty of programs that support AVIF image format like:
- Paint.net image editor: https://avif.io/blog/tutorials/paintnet/
- VLC media playere: https://avif.io/blog/tutorials/vlc/

List of supported programs:
https://avif.io/blog/

[grofaty (grofaty)]

I did some test. Created print screen and saved image in JPEG in Pinta 1.8-dev.
Then I used https://convertio.co/jpg-avif/ to convert JPEG to AVIF.

JPEG saved in Pinta: 378 kB
AVIF converted by convertio.co: 6 kB

See attachments for yourself. Very impressive.

[Paddy Landau (paddy-landau)]

AVIF is indeed having a major influence, and it does provide better image quality than JPEG for the same or better compression (for this reason, Netflix uses it on supported devices). AVIF helps to reduce bandwidth on websites. It supports both lossy and lossless.

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More information:

• You can convert images free of charge using https://avif.io/ (the work is done on your computer; nothing is sent over the internet).

• GIMP in Flatpak supports AVIF, but not GIMP in snap. The snap version should be included in this fix.

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Temporary workaround:

As a temporary workaround, you can add AVIF support to Image Viewer, Nautilus, the Desktop, and Ubuntu in general with the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Source: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/09/thumb-3-12-avif-heif-image-support

However, AVIF should be built into Ubuntu instead of relying on a third-party repository.

[grofaty (grofaty)]

This is probably interesting info for AVIF support:
https://pkgs.org/search/?q=avif-pixbuf-loader

[Olivier Dufour (olivier-duff)]

it seems that libavif have a gdk pixbuf module :
https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/pull/182/files
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdk-pixbuf/-/merge_requests/76

build libavif with DAVIF_BUILD_GDK_PIXBUF=ON then build gdk-pixbuf then gdk-sharp and format will apear so I guess it is a maintainer problem to build the whole chain to have it on gdk-sharp with libavif.
So best is open a ticket + PR to gtk-sharp lib to add dependency

[Cameron White (cameronwhite91)]

Yeah, I think it's more up to the various distributions to build libavif with gdk pixbuf support. The only thing to perhaps do on our end is getting the snap / flatpak packages to support this

[Cameron White (cameronwhite91)]

GtkSharp just uses the gdk-pixbuf library that's already installed on the system, so it's more of a general packaging thing