JPEG XL faces fierce competition from AVIF. And Google. A bit of both0:00 - What is JPEG?1:20 - JPEG XL2:07 - AVIF3:08 - JPEG XL's Strengths4:58 - AVIF Suppo...
TL:DW, JPEG is getting old in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.
However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.
Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner. We already have PNG and JPG and now we’ve got people using the annoying webP. Adding another format that requires new decoder support isn’t going to help.
Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner.
According to the video, and this article, JPEG XL is backwards compatible with JPEG.
But I’m not sure if that’s all that necessary. JPEG XL was designed to be a full, long term replacement to JPEG. Old JPEG’s compression is very lossy, while JPEG XL, with the same amount of computational power, speed, and size, outclasses it entirely. PNG is lossless, and thus is not comparable since the file size is so much larger.
JPEG XL, at least from what I’m seeing, does appear to be the best full replacement for JPEG (and it’s not like they can’t co-exist).
It’s only backwards compatible in that it can re-encode existing jpeg content into the newer format without any image loss. Existing browsers and apps can’t render jpegXL without adding a new decoder.
Legacy client support. Old devices running old browser code can’t support a new format without software updates, and that’s not always possible. Decoding jxl on a 15yo device that’s not upgradable isn’t good UX. Sure, you probably can work around that with slow JavaScript decoding for many but it’ll be slow and processor intensive. Imagine decoding jxl on a low power arm device or something like a Celeron from the early 2010s and you’ll get the idea, it will not be anywhere near as fast as good old jpeg.
Google rammed webp through because it saved them money on bandwidth (and time during page loading) and because they controlled the standard. They’re doing the same thing with jpeg now that they control jpegli. Jpegli directly lifts the majority of features from jpegxl and google controls that standard.
That’s a good argument, and as a fan of permacomputing and reducing e-waste, I must admit I’m fairly swayed by it.
However, are you sure JPEG XL decode/encode is more computationally heavy than JPEG to where it would struggle on older hardware? This measurement seems to show that it’s quite comparable to standard JPEG, unless I’m misunderstanding something (and I very well might be).
That wouldn’t help the people stuck on an outdated browser (older, unsupported phones?), but for those who can change their OS, like older PC’s, a modern Linux distro with an updated browser would still allow that old hardware to decode JPEG XL’s fairly well, I would hope.
Optimized jpegxl decoding can be as fast as jpeg but only if the browser supports the format natively. If you’re trying to bolt jxl decoding onto a legacy browser your options become JavaScript and WASM decoding. WASM can be as fast but browsers released before like 2020 won’t support it and need to use JavaScript to do the job. Decoding jxl in JavaScript is, let’s just say it’s not fast and it’s not guaranteed to work on legacy browsers and older machines. Additionally any of these bolt on mechanisms require sending the decoder package on page load so unless you’re able to load that from the user’s cache you pay the bandwidth/time price of downloading and initializing the decoder code before images even start to render on the page. Ultimately bolting on support for the new format just isn’t worth the cost of the implementation in many cases so sites usually implement fallback to the older format as well.
Webp succeeded because Google rammed the format through and they did that because they controlled the standard. You’ll see the same thing happen with the jpegli format next, it lifts the majority of its featureset from jpegxl and Google controls the standard.
The video actually references that comic at the end.
But I don’t see how that applies in your example, since both JPEG and JPEG XL existing in parallel doesn’t really have any downsides, it’d just be nice to have the newer option available. The thrust of the video is that Google is kneecapping JPEG XL in favor of their own format, which is not backwards compatible with JPEG in any capacity. So we’re getting a brand new format either way, but a monopoly is forcing a worse format.
Adding more decoders means more overheads in code size, projects dependencies, maintanance, developer bandwidth and higher potential for security vulnerabilities.
A balance has to be struck. The alternative isn’t not getting anything better, it’s being sure the benefits are worth the costs. The comment was “Why is [adding another decoder] a negative?” There is a cost to it, and while most people don’t think about this stuff, someone does.
The floppy code was destined to be removed from Linux because no one wanted to maintain it and it had such a small user base. Fortunately I think some people stepped up to look after it but that could have made preserving old software significantly harder.
If image formats get abandoned, browsers are going to face hard decisions as to whether to drop support. There has to be some push-back to over-proliferation of formats or we could be in a worse position than now, where there are only two or three viable browser alternatives that can keep up with the churn of web technologies.
I mean, the comic is even in the OP. The whole point is that AVIF is already out there, like it or not. I’m not happy about Google setting the standards but that has to be supported. Does JPEGXL cross the line where it’s really worth adding in addition to AVIF? It’s easy to yes when you’re not the one supporting it.
They’re confusing backwards and forwards compatible. The new file format is backwards compatible but the old renderers are not forward compatible with the new format.
My understanding is that webp isn’t actually all that bad from a technical perspective, it was just annoying because it started getting used widely on the web before all the various tools caught up and implemented support for it.
I just wish more software would support webp files. I remember Reddit converting every image to webp to save on space and bandwidth (smart, imo) but not allowing you to directly upload webp files in posts because it wasn’t a supported file format.
If webp was just more standardized, I’d love to use it more. It would certainly save me a ton of storage space.
It’s a different culture between PCs and consoles. Consoles are standardized computers - they all have the same* hardware. Game developers can be confident in what functionality their games have access to, and so use the best they can.
PCs in comparison are wildly different from user to user due to being modular: you can pick from many parts to create a computer. As such, devs tend to focus on what most PC’s can do and make them optionally better if the PC has access to supporting hardware (e.g. RTX ray-tracing cores).
Besides, video games are drastically complex in comparison to static images 😛
You have to offer something compelling for everyone. Just coming out with yet another new standard™ isn’t enough. As pointed out earlier, we already have:
jpeg
Png
Webp
HEIC
What’s the point of adding another encoder/decoder to the table when PNG and JPEG are still “good enough”?
PNG and JPEG aren’t good enough, to be honest. If you run a content heavy site, you can see something like a 30-70% decrease in bandwidth usage by using WebP.
You can’t add new and better stuff while staying compatible with the old stuff. Especially not when your goal is compact files (or you’d just embed the old format).
Look it’s all actually about re-encumberancing image file formats back into corporate controlled patented formats. If we would collectively just spend time and money and development resources expanding and improving PNG and gif formats that are no longer patent encumbered, we’d all live happily ever after.
Clawing control of patent infected media standards is far more important for a healthy open internet built on open standards that is not subject to the whims and controls of capital investment groups eating up companies to exert control of the entire technology standards pipeline.
If AVIF was not patent encumbered, AOMedia would not need to have a Patent License to allow open source use.
A majority of the most recent standards are effectively cabal esque private groups of Corporations that hold patents that on the underlying technology and then license the patents among each other as part of the standards org and throw a license bone towards open source. That can all be undone by the patent holders at their whim.
There’s no need to create a standard format that’s patent encumbered especially if they don’t ever intend to monetize that paten,t. It’s all about maintaining control of intellectual property and especially who was allowed and when they are allowed to profit from the standards.
Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. Even if it’s conditioned on a grant of reciprocality. It’s only when patent holders start demanding money (or worse, withholding licenses altogether) that it becomes a problem
Google’s handling of jxl makes a lot more sense after the jpegli announcement. It’s apparent now that they declined to support jxl in favor of cloning many of jxl’s features in a format they control.
TL:DW, JPEG is getting old in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.
However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.
This is why Google keeps getting caught up in monopoly lawsuits.
Modern Google is becoming the Microsoft of the 90s
And they’ll make eleventy bajillion dollars in the meantime, plenty of money to pay their inevitable punitive “fines.”
Hell old MSs penalty was giving free licenses in markets it never had a grip on, so its “lock 'em in!” model meant the “penalty” benefited them!
Which is funny and said because Microsoft is also the Microsoft of the 90s.
Microsoft is still like this
I tried JPEG XL and it didn’t even make my files extra large. It actually made them SMALLER.
False advertising.
I think you took the wrong enlargement pill.
Just set the pills to wumbo.
Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner. We already have PNG and JPG and now we’ve got people using the annoying webP. Adding another format that requires new decoder support isn’t going to help.
“the annoying webp” AFAIK is the same problem as JPEG XL, apps just didn’t implement it.
It is supported in browsers, which is good, but not in third party apps. AVIF or whatever is going to have the same problem.
According to the video, and this article, JPEG XL is backwards compatible with JPEG.
But I’m not sure if that’s all that necessary. JPEG XL was designed to be a full, long term replacement to JPEG. Old JPEG’s compression is very lossy, while JPEG XL, with the same amount of computational power, speed, and size, outclasses it entirely. PNG is lossless, and thus is not comparable since the file size is so much larger.
JPEG XL, at least from what I’m seeing, does appear to be the best full replacement for JPEG (and it’s not like they can’t co-exist).
It’s only backwards compatible in that it can re-encode existing jpeg content into the newer format without any image loss. Existing browsers and apps can’t render jpegXL without adding a new decoder.
Why is that a negative?
Legacy client support. Old devices running old browser code can’t support a new format without software updates, and that’s not always possible. Decoding jxl on a 15yo device that’s not upgradable isn’t good UX. Sure, you probably can work around that with slow JavaScript decoding for many but it’ll be slow and processor intensive. Imagine decoding jxl on a low power arm device or something like a Celeron from the early 2010s and you’ll get the idea, it will not be anywhere near as fast as good old jpeg.
But how is that different to any other new format? Webp was no different?
Google rammed webp through because it saved them money on bandwidth (and time during page loading) and because they controlled the standard. They’re doing the same thing with jpeg now that they control jpegli. Jpegli directly lifts the majority of features from jpegxl and google controls that standard.
That’s a good argument, and as a fan of permacomputing and reducing e-waste, I must admit I’m fairly swayed by it.
However, are you sure JPEG XL decode/encode is more computationally heavy than JPEG to where it would struggle on older hardware? This measurement seems to show that it’s quite comparable to standard JPEG, unless I’m misunderstanding something (and I very well might be).
That wouldn’t help the people stuck on an outdated browser (older, unsupported phones?), but for those who can change their OS, like older PC’s, a modern Linux distro with an updated browser would still allow that old hardware to decode JPEG XL’s fairly well, I would hope.
Optimized jpegxl decoding can be as fast as jpeg but only if the browser supports the format natively. If you’re trying to bolt jxl decoding onto a legacy browser your options become JavaScript and WASM decoding. WASM can be as fast but browsers released before like 2020 won’t support it and need to use JavaScript to do the job. Decoding jxl in JavaScript is, let’s just say it’s not fast and it’s not guaranteed to work on legacy browsers and older machines. Additionally any of these bolt on mechanisms require sending the decoder package on page load so unless you’re able to load that from the user’s cache you pay the bandwidth/time price of downloading and initializing the decoder code before images even start to render on the page. Ultimately bolting on support for the new format just isn’t worth the cost of the implementation in many cases so sites usually implement fallback to the older format as well.
Webp succeeded because Google rammed the format through and they did that because they controlled the standard. You’ll see the same thing happen with the jpegli format next, it lifts the majority of its featureset from jpegxl and Google controls the standard.
https://xkcd.com/927/
The video actually references that comic at the end.
But I don’t see how that applies in your example, since both JPEG and JPEG XL existing in parallel doesn’t really have any downsides, it’d just be nice to have the newer option available. The thrust of the video is that Google is kneecapping JPEG XL in favor of their own format, which is not backwards compatible with JPEG in any capacity. So we’re getting a brand new format either way, but a monopoly is forcing a worse format.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Adding more decoders means more overheads in code size, projects dependencies, maintanance, developer bandwidth and higher potential for security vulnerabilities.
The alternative is to never have anything better, which is not realistic
Yes, it means more code, but that’s an inevitability. We already have lots of legacy stuff, like, say, floppy disk drivers
A balance has to be struck. The alternative isn’t not getting anything better, it’s being sure the benefits are worth the costs. The comment was “Why is [adding another decoder] a negative?” There is a cost to it, and while most people don’t think about this stuff, someone does.
The floppy code was destined to be removed from Linux because no one wanted to maintain it and it had such a small user base. Fortunately I think some people stepped up to look after it but that could have made preserving old software significantly harder.
If image formats get abandoned, browsers are going to face hard decisions as to whether to drop support. There has to be some push-back to over-proliferation of formats or we could be in a worse position than now, where there are only two or three viable browser alternatives that can keep up with the churn of web technologies.
I mean, the comic is even in the OP. The whole point is that AVIF is already out there, like it or not. I’m not happy about Google setting the standards but that has to be supported. Does JPEGXL cross the line where it’s really worth adding in addition to AVIF? It’s easy to yes when you’re not the one supporting it.
They’re confusing backwards and forwards compatible. The new file format is backwards compatible but the old renderers are not forward compatible with the new format.
JPEG XL in lossless mode actually gives around 50% smaller file sizes than PNG
Oh damn, even better than the estimates I found.
My understanding is that webp isn’t actually all that bad from a technical perspective, it was just annoying because it started getting used widely on the web before all the various tools caught up and implemented support for it.
It’s certainly not bad. It’s just not quite as good.
I just wish more software would support webp files. I remember Reddit converting every image to webp to save on space and bandwidth (smart, imo) but not allowing you to directly upload webp files in posts because it wasn’t a supported file format.
If webp was just more standardized, I’d love to use it more. It would certainly save me a ton of storage space.
Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t this like complaining that a PlayStation 2 can’t play PS5 games?
It’s a different culture between PCs and consoles. Consoles are standardized computers - they all have the same* hardware. Game developers can be confident in what functionality their games have access to, and so use the best they can.
PCs in comparison are wildly different from user to user due to being modular: you can pick from many parts to create a computer. As such, devs tend to focus on what most PC’s can do and make them optionally better if the PC has access to supporting hardware (e.g. RTX ray-tracing cores).
Besides, video games are drastically complex in comparison to static images 😛
All the cool kids use .HEIF anyway
I use jpeg 2000
Isn’t that the same as other newer formats though?
There’s always something new, and if the new thing is better, adding/switching to it is the better move.
Or am I missing something about the other formats like webp?
You have to offer something compelling for everyone. Just coming out with yet another new standard™ isn’t enough. As pointed out earlier, we already have:
What’s the point of adding another encoder/decoder to the table when PNG and JPEG are still “good enough”?
PNG and JPEG aren’t good enough, to be honest. If you run a content heavy site, you can see something like a 30-70% decrease in bandwidth usage by using WebP.
You can’t add new and better stuff while staying compatible with the old stuff. Especially not when your goal is compact files (or you’d just embed the old format).
Look it’s all actually about re-encumberancing image file formats back into corporate controlled patented formats. If we would collectively just spend time and money and development resources expanding and improving PNG and gif formats that are no longer patent encumbered, we’d all live happily ever after.
its royalty free and has an open source implementation, what more could you want?
No patent encumbrance. That was the entire point.
Clawing control of patent infected media standards is far more important for a healthy open internet built on open standards that is not subject to the whims and controls of capital investment groups eating up companies to exert control of the entire technology standards pipeline.
JPEG-XL is in no way patent encumbered. Neither is AVIF. I don’t know what you’re talking about
https://encode.su/threads/3863-RANS-Microsoft-wins-data-encoding-patent
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/
https://avifstudio.com/blogs/faq/avif-patents/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910515
https://aomedia.org/press releases/the-alliance-for-open-media-statement/
If AVIF was not patent encumbered, AOMedia would not need to have a Patent License to allow open source use.
A majority of the most recent standards are effectively cabal esque private groups of Corporations that hold patents that on the underlying technology and then license the patents among each other as part of the standards org and throw a license bone towards open source. That can all be undone by the patent holders at their whim.
There’s no need to create a standard format that’s patent encumbered especially if they don’t ever intend to monetize that paten,t. It’s all about maintaining control of intellectual property and especially who was allowed and when they are allowed to profit from the standards.
Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. Even if it’s conditioned on a grant of reciprocality. It’s only when patent holders start demanding money (or worse, withholding licenses altogether) that it becomes a problem
Why was it not included? AVIF creator influence bias. It’s a good story.
Google’s handling of jxl makes a lot more sense after the jpegli announcement. It’s apparent now that they declined to support jxl in favor of cloning many of jxl’s features in a format they control.
Why wasn’t PNG enough to replace jpeg?
PNG is a lossless format, and hence results in fairly large file sized compared to compressed formats, so they’re solving different issues.
JPEG XL is capable of being either lossy or lossless, so it sorta replaces both JPEG and PNG
not enough elitists
Does jpegxl work on firefox?
Only in Nightly and not by default (you need to enable it).
It doesn’t work anywhere because full support requires so much stuff that no browser can be compatible.
And JPEG2000 is what’s used in Digital Cinema Package (DCP) - that’s the file format used to distribute feature films. That’s not going away soon.