As Hosting Prices Climb, One Blogger Asks: Why Isn't AVIF Everywhere?
Isn't It Time for AVIF Everywhere?
With HDD, SSD, and NVMe prices climbing and Hetzner raising rates multiple times in 2026, the author argues hosting providers, Mastodon, Bluesky, and phone makers should embrace AVIF and WebP for images and AV1/AV2 for video. AVIF compresses better than WebP at comparable quality, and letting users encode on their own hardware before uploading would ease the load on servers. YouTube's planned AV2 move shows the payoff of efficiency.
Switching formats won't solve the hardware shortages, but it could help us make better use of the resources we already have, especially for smaller hosting providers and independent services that don't have the financial resources of larger companies.
- simonw
Only just started habitually using WebP...
I added AVIF support to my personal image resizing tool recently - https://tools.simonwillison.net/image-resize-quality - I mostly use that for screenshots though, and WebP works better for those.
- remix2000
Does AVIF carry the same patent risks as full/motion AV1?
(I’m not saying I support the claims or not, I have no idea about their technical and let alone legal merit, just thinking that there are attempts at enforcement against sites streaming AV1 and whether choosing AV1 puts say my site at risk)
- Aldipower
AVIF consumes around 25 times more CPU during encoding as JPEG. Take this in consideration if you pay for the power consumption. And on the user-facing side, if you upload an images it takes f.ex. 12 seconds (sic!) and not half a second.
- kasabali
> Even YouTube is preparing to move beyond AV1 and begin streaming video using AV2, potentially as early as 2027. If a company handling the enormous amount of video that YouTube does sees the benefits of a more efficient format, shouldn't the rest of the internet be taking a closer look at what we can do with images and video too?
Odd argument.
Image isn’t video and we are not YouTube.
- nwah1
Regular JPEG can also be compressed much more than it usually is:
https://symbiogenesis.github.io/DotJpegli/
However, video would matter so much more than images, to the overall internet, that images don't even matter by comparison.