cavif — PNG/JPEG to AVIF converter

Encoder/converter for AVIF images. Based on rav1e and avif-serialize, which makes it pure Rust, with no C code!

Installation

➡️ Download the latest release ⬅️

The pre-built zip includes a Debian package and a portable static executable, with no dependencies, that runs on any Linux distro. It also includes executables for macOS and Windows.

Compatibility

• Chrome 85 desktop and libavif: full support, except the --premultiplied-alpha option.
• Firefox: only behind a flag, and doesn't support images with alpha channel yet.

Building

To build it from source you need:

• Rust 1.45 or later, preferably via rustup
• nasm 2.14 or later

Then run in a terminal:

bash cargo install cavif

Running

Run in a terminal (hint: you don't need to type the path, terminals accept file drag'n'drop)

bash cavif image.png

It makes image.avif. You can adjust quality (it's in 1-100 scale):

bash cavif --quality 60 image.png

Usage

You can also specify multiple images (encoding is multi-threaded, so the more, the better!).

text cavif [OPTIONS] IMAGES...

• --quality=n — Quality from 1 (worst) to 100 (best), the default value is 80. The numbers have different meaning than JPEG's quality scale. Beware when comparing codecs.
• --speed=n — Encoding speed between 1 (best, but slowest) and 10 (fastest, but a blurry mess), the default value is 1. Encoding of AVIF is pretty slow, so you need either a) beefy multicore machine b) avoid large images c) patience.
• --overwrite — Replace files if there's .avif already. By default existing files are left untouched.
• -o path — Write output to this path instead of samefile.avif. If multiple input files are specified, it's interpreted as a directory.
• --quiet — Don't print anything during conversion.
• --premultiplied-alpha — Warning: currently incompatible with libavif. Improves compression of transparent images by clearing RGB of fully transparent pixels and lowering quality of semi-transparent colors.
• --dirty-alpha — Don't change RGB values of transparent pixels. By default irrelevant color of transparent pixels is cleared to avoid wasting space.
• --color=rgb — encode using RGB color space instead of YCbCr color space. Makes color closer to lossless, but makes files larger.