Hey mates,

in case you’ve been wondering why some animated sigs lately don’t look as “gif-typical” anymore and feel a lot smoother, there’s a reason for that.

It’s not like GIFs suddenly got better. There’s now another way to run animations that doesn’t come with the usual limitations. No 32-256 color cap crap, much better compression, and you can push smoother motion without instantly hitting the size limit. We’re talking stuff like ~5 seconds at 25 fps.

The solution is called AVIF (https://google.com/search?q=what+is+an+avif)

Here is a small example:


(67.7KiB, 400x150px, frames: 7, type: gif, length: 1 sec)



(66.15KiB, 400x150px, frames: 146, type: avif, length: 5 sec)

Both of these images are within the d2jsp sig rules! And no, this isn’t some workaround or exploit. I talked to the staff and it’s officially allowed now.

Not gonna turn this into a full tutorial, and I’m not claiming this is the perfect workflow, but you can get solid results by exporting your sig as an mp4 and converting it to AVIF via ezgif. You’ll probably have to tweak some settings to get the best outcome, but it’s definitely worth looking into.

Figured I’d share this with you guys in the spirit of fair competition. Some of you have really great animations, and it hurts a bit to see their quality getting held back by file format limitations.

Curious to see what people do with it and love to see a new era of high quality sig animations 😁

Peace


Edit:Forgot to mention one thing: the only downside to avif files are that they a currently not supported by imgur. you have to either use a personal server or a image hosting service that supports avif (catbox.moe maybe).

This post was edited by Eruptix on Apr 13 2026 06:53am

Y catbox support it

appreciate the share sir! this is some interesting news. only quick question for you after reading is are you seeing ppl or personally also taking .gif animation files raw, saving as mp4 and then converting to .AVIF or does that defeat the purpose and you just build your animation from ground up & save as .mp4 right away?

This post was edited by NetnYahoo on Apr 15 2026 11:54am

I had the best results when converting from mp4 to avif. But I think you can also save kbs when converting from gif > mp4 > avif. In the end it comes to just trial and error until you find a sweetspot between quality and size.

For me personally it makes no sense to export as gif as I mostly do animations in after effects.

Thanks! :thumbsup:

Sir you saved my life!
Bit unfortunate about imgur indeed, luckily i've got hosting!

This post was edited by phunk1989 on May 4 2026 03:01am

You could also just host your .avif images on Github, for free:

Create account -> Create repo -> upload your images to your repo -> repo settings -> pages -> sources: deploy from a branch -> branch: main | /(root)
Last step might differ depending on your repo structure.

Then with a little bit of harry potter html magic, you could even make a simple gallery page for your images, such as: https://zvf1.github.io/img/gallery.html (so that you have a preview for your images, rather than needing to remember file names)

When using Github Pages, rather than raw.githubusercontent.com, you get proper image caching deployed behind Fastly (a proper CDN). Way faster compared to the obscure Catbox.moe

If this happened 18 years ago this thread would've had 1000's of replies lol
Truly amazing to see this though. Honestly... and thank you for the info/guide.

Ok i need a sig/avatar in this new format. Whats price for both?

wow this is the future of sig/ava and whatever graphics designers

This post was edited by Zesicla on Jul 13 2026 10:58am