AVIF is a next-generation image format for the Web, that’s supported by all major browsers except IE and Edge. It has better compression than WebP, which itself is a great improvement as a replacement for JPG.

As of today, the most efficient way to encode JPG images into AVIF is to use libavif’s avifenc. There are no prebuilt binaries; if you use Homebrew on Linux all you have to do is brew install libavif, but if you don’t you’ll probably have to build from source.

The instructions below work as of today for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. We’ll first install libaom and then libavif.

Prepare dependencies

Let’s start by installing a few dependencies:

sudo apt install ninja-build yasm pandoc

ninja-build is used to build both libaom and libavif; you can remove it after. yasm is a dependency of libaom. pandoc is needed to build the avifenc manpage; remove it if you don’t want it. In any case, you’ll be able to remove it after the build.

Install libaom

These instructions are adapted from Linux from scratch:

# Download the release
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/aom-releases/libaom-3.6.1.tar.gz
# Uncompress it
tar xzf libaom-3.6.1.tar.gz
# Create a temporary directory for the build
mkdir libaom-3.6.1/aom-build
# Move into it
pushd libaom-3.6.1/aom-build
# Configure the build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release  \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=1       \
      -DENABLE_DOCS=no            \
      -G Ninja ..
# Build
ninja
# Install
sudo ninja install
# Exit the temporary directory
popd
# Clean up
rm -rf libaom-3.6.1*

Install libavif

Installing libavif follows a similar path to libaom (again, adapted from LFS):

# Download the release (for some reason I get a 403 when I use wget)
curl -Lo libavif-0.11.1.tar.gz https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/archive/refs/tags/v0.11.1.tar.gz
# Uncompress it
tar xzf libavif-0.11.1.tar.gz
# Create a temporary directory for the build
mkdir libavif-0.11.1/build
# Move into it
pushd libavif-0.11.1/build
# Configure the build.
#   If you don't want to install the manpage, remove -DAVIF_BUILD_MAN_PAGES=ON
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release  \
      -DAVIF_CODEC_AOM=ON         \
      -DAVIF_BUILD_GDK_PIXBUF=ON  \
      -DAVIF_BUILD_MAN_PAGES=ON   \
      -DAVIF_BUILD_APPS=ON        \
      -G Ninja ..
# Build
ninja
# Install
sudo ninja install

# Exit the temporary directory
popd
# Clean up
rm -rf libavif-0.11.1*

Finish

You can now remove the build dependencies: sudo apt remove ninja-build pandoc.

Try running avifenc. If it prints a long help text, then it’s properly installed! You can now encode images in AVIF format with avifenc source.jpg target.avif. Check the help or the manpage for all the available options.