Comment by fsiefken
9 hours ago
hi initramfs, i responded to robottoaster who referenced patent encumbered mp4, as alternatives there are vp9 and av1.
image formats are more backward compatible, but at some point one has to ask, how low do you want to go? vp9 plays on iphones from 2020 and android phones from 2010. I think animated avif files are basically av1 video files, like animated webp is vp8/9 video.
Animated gif is playable anywhere, but 10x bigger. For a wiggle blog or website I'd provide animated png alongside anaglyph, or anaglyph only.
There is also animated Jpeg XL *.jxl files for the bleeding edge. It's a pure image format but support is not there yet.
hi fseifken,
Thanks for the response and I agree there are benefits to newer formats. I actually do prefer newer codecs when I am using a newer system, such as AV1 (I actually wrote a blog post on that yesterday https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/720p-on-384kbps-how-h...), and recall avif, but forgot about it.
I think .avif sounds preferrable since it is single frames able to play animations using the same library as av01. I am curious how much CPU usage it needs for a just a few frames. A Pentium 1 might not be able to play it easily, but I imagine a dual core Intel E6400 wouldn't have much of an issue, even if it is 20 years old.
Yeah, basically the only reason I suggested older support was because it was just a couple frames (maybe 5 tops), as opposed to something that uses hundreds or thousands of frames.