Discord Now Supports WebP And AVIF Formats, Replaces The Old GIF Format

Discord added a new image format (photo: dock. Discord)

JAKARTA The Discord platform now supports two new image formats to maximize the appearance of the media, especially animation. The two image formats are WebP and AVIF.

Over the past six months, the media infrastructure team on Discord has been trying to improve image displays on the platform. Therefore, they added new format support to make media display, emoji, and other animations smoother.

"Now you can share animation WebP and AVIF content via attachment and solely, while all animation emojis are presented as animated WebPs are shown smoothly on each Discord platform," the platform said on its official website.

In addition, Discord emphasized that these two formats are much better than the GIF format which still emphasizes its pixels. Although the GIF format is more common and has accompanied internet users for decades, this format is old or outdated.

GIF has some limitations, such as the lack of true alpha transparency and inefficient compression. This format is also limited to 8 bits per pixel with a total of 256 colors, very few when compared to other formats.

WebP provides 8 bits per color channel equivalent to 16 million colors, while AVIF has a further coverage, which is 12 bits per channel. Therefore, it is not surprising that the color gradient looks smoother, more lively, and more accurate thanks to these two formats.

The representation of photographic content is also better if you use WebP and AVIF formats. With these various advantages, these two formats can maximize the appearance of content on the platform while improving the user experience.

"These changes are designed to enable higher-quality animation and better playback performance across all platforms while reducing the file size drastically, and in turn, making it load faster," Discord said.