Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The case for JPEG XL

cloudinary.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 210 posts

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#71

Post by prox »

Heikete wrote: post #53

The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind. Here in Poland most of the tech people use Firefox as that was the alternative when IE was a bad guy and Firefox continues to be a good browser. What was the advantage of Chrome which made people exchange one monopoly for another? PNG had also hard times in IE at first, as far as I remember. So instead of fighting f…

For a while Firefox was slower, and Chrome was quicker. That really was important plus Android/Chrome was a combination as well with the proliferation of the cheap smartphone. A sizeable portions of devs came unto the market with that background, and chrome dev tools had a bit of an edge with a few functionalities.

Firefox never had a monopoly, unless you still count Netscape Navigator in that. IE was big until 2006-08, started dropping off quickly after that, Firefox won a big share in that time, but at some point Chrome just chipped away marketshare for reasons stated above.

I think bundling was a big deal by Google, something Microsoft got punished for, but Google never.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#72

Post by wahnfrieden »

est wrote: post #39
JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #25

Beautifully written article -- I couldn't agree more. From my personal point of view the biggest impact are: 1) e-commerce textures such as cloths are more faitfully represented -- more trust in e-commerce, more revenue 2) more equity for selfies, people-of-color skin is better represented in JPEG XL, selfies in general look more people like with less smoothing of skin performed at compression stage -- I'm a great fr…

> people-of-color skin is better represented in JPEG XL wait what? What is this woodoo and why it itsn't the case for other image formats in which encodings color in RGB?

Why do you call this “woo” pejoratively right off the bat before admitting you don’t know?

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#73

Post by bjarneh »

Heikete wrote: post #53

The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind. Here in Poland most of the tech people use Firefox as that was the alternative when IE was a bad guy and Firefox continues to be a good browser. What was the advantage of Chrome which made people exchange one monopoly for another? PNG had also hard times in IE at first, as far as I remember. So instead of fighting f…

> is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind

Not all of us have left Firefox behind of course, but we are certainly not what we used to be.

> shouldn't we just fight for more diversity in browserland?

We should; and especially in browser-engine-land. WebKit/Blink are becoming a monopoly..

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#74

Post by squarefoot »

sangnoir wrote: post #66
Heikete wrote: post #53

The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind. Here in Poland most of the tech people use Firefox as that was the alternative when IE was a bad guy and Firefox continues to be a good browser. What was the advantage of Chrome which made people exchange one monopoly for another? PNG had also hard times in IE at first, as far as I remember. So instead of fighting f…

> The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind Reasons why I, a former Firefox promoter switched to Chrome: 1. Speed. Chrome was blazing fast compared to other browser 2. Stability: Chrome could have a tab crash without bringing down your entire browser. 3. Really good developer tools that were superior to Firebug. As a matter of fact, Chrome Dev tools were my…

Situation has changed dramatically wrt points 1 and 2 since years, however. As for 3, I'm no web developer so can't comment on this.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#75

Post by hulitu »

Heikete wrote: post #53

The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind. Here in Poland most of the tech people use Firefox as that was the alternative when IE was a bad guy and Firefox continues to be a good browser. What was the advantage of Chrome which made people exchange one monopoly for another? PNG had also hard times in IE at first, as far as I remember. So instead of fighting f…

> The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind

I didn't switch to Chrome. I switched to orher browsers. For me the turning point was when Firefox started deprecating its old GUI and copying more and more the Chrome GUI: no menu, hidden preferencies, messing with the window's titlebar and implementing its own (very small) scrollbars, messing with DNS, etc.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#76

Post by JyrkiAlakuijala »

est wrote: post #39
JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #25

Beautifully written article -- I couldn't agree more. From my personal point of view the biggest impact are: 1) e-commerce textures such as cloths are more faitfully represented -- more trust in e-commerce, more revenue 2) more equity for selfies, people-of-color skin is better represented in JPEG XL, selfies in general look more people like with less smoothing of skin performed at compression stage -- I'm a great fr…

> people-of-color skin is better represented in JPEG XL wait what? What is this woodoo and why it itsn't the case for other image formats in which encodings color in RGB?

Some of it relates to the modeling of spontaneous excitation bias of opsin molecule releasing their energy in the retina. These are modeled in the compression curve in JPEG XL by a bias before the compression non-linearity, whereas other codecs don't have that bias unless they use sRGB -- sRGB has modeled the bias as a short linear slope, but compresses in wrong directions (RGB) in the color space, not LMS. In JPEG XL, the compression curves happen in the direction of LMS reception directions, not in RGB, that makes reds, browns, oranges, purple colors a lot more uniform in quantization. Finally, more emphasis was spend with visual masking in JPEG XL, to avoid blurring in 'fragile' textures even if they are in the same compression block with sharp edges.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#77

Post by gruturo »

rob74 wrote: post #45
dmitriid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google don't need to resort to such tricks when they can just bludgeon everyone to death. Se how they forced support of VP9 and AV1: https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues

Not to mention WebP, which I guess is the elephant in the room when they say that JPEG XL "does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats".

And which is very unconvincing in real world use.... It benchmarks well, but "looks" crap. I really wish they had produced something better than that, if that's what we're going to be stuck with. It's sad.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#78

Post by ux »

> A unique feature of JPEG XL is that it is possible to recompress existing JPEG images (of which there are a lot out there!) to a JPEG XL file that is on average about 20% smaller, without introducing any loss. In fact, the bit-exact same JPEG file can be reconstructed from the JPEG XL file.

I wasn't aware of this and this is actually crazy, and freaking brilliant from a migration point of view. I wonder how that was achieved. I didn't care so much about JPEG XL, now thanks to Google derping I want it everywhere.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#79

Post by chungy »

rob74 wrote: post #45
dmitriid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google don't need to resort to such tricks when they can just bludgeon everyone to death. Se how they forced support of VP9 and AV1: https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues

Not to mention WebP, which I guess is the elephant in the room when they say that JPEG XL "does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats".

I mean, WebP is _okay_ but it leaves a lot to be desired, even when it comes to image quality compared to the old 1992 JPEG standard; coupled with mozjpeg making giant leaps to get old-school JPEG file sizes drastically smaller without costing quality, the original file size advantage WebP pitched is not as large of a selling point.

WebP's best quality is that in lossless mode, it usually results in smaller files than PNGs, but given that it was primarily focused at being a lossy format to replace JPEG, with a 16383×16383 size limit[1], color space fixed at YUV 4:2:0 only[2], marginal space savings, no progressive decoding, it comes up short in a number of scenarios. There's also the breadth of legacy JPEG-encoded files without a good transition story to WebP, especially due to most JPEGs in the world not being of YUV 4:2:0 format.

I sound like I'm hating WebP here and I'm not trying to, but my own personal uses for WebP have been squarely in the lossless mode side with a JPEG-encoded thumbnail to accompany it. WebP's primary selling point were file size benefits, but then mozjpeg really not just improved JPEG 1992, but made it a compelling choice to use instead of WebP.

JPEG XL really stands to be the best of everything. No fixed colorspace model, no image size limits, smaller lossy and lossless files than previous formats, progressive decoding, etc. It's a solid win for JPEG XL, especially if browsers start adopting it for production.

[1] Size limit applies to lossy and lossless mode both.

[2] Lossless mode's color space is fixed at 32-bit BGRA only. Same issue, different spec.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#80

Post by JyrkiAlakuijala »

mastax wrote: post #44

> One final significant benefit of JPEG XL is that it has a broad scope: while it is a great format for web delivery, this is not the only use case it was designed for. JPEG XL can also be used as a capture format, where it can play a role similar to current camera raw formats: high precision, high dynamic range, lossless or minimal lossy compression. It can also be used as an authoring format, supporting named layer…

JPEG XL format internals are beautiful -- control structures are self-similar and the image coding itself is used to code substructures, similar to WebP lossless.

libjxl C++ implementation is modern high-performance multi-threaded SIMD code, with layering, animation, streaming and progressive features, it can look scary. With some less emphasis on performance it could be written rather elegantly.

Post reply on HN