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by rpbiwer2 1105 days ago
I'm not very familiar with media encoding formats. What makes webp and avif well suited for delivery but not general purpose?
1 comments

They're suited for delivery because they're based on video codecs (WebP on VP8, AVIF on AV1) for which consumer hardware typically has hardware decoding support, but were not designed for still images. AVIF is newer and substantially better than WebP, but still has limited colour depth and channels, so it's comparatively poor for editing. Lossless mode is not good for non-photo content. Encoding is relatively slow without hardware support.
> They're suited for delivery because they're based on video codecs (WebP on VP8, AVIF on AV1) for which consumer hardware typically has hardware decoding support,

But no one is doing HW decode for web images. (other than maybe Apple with JPEG? I've seen conflicting reports). AVIF images that aren't actually videos are always software decoded.