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The case for JPEG XL

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Re: The case for JPEG XL

#152
post #67
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…

How is this relevant to this article given that Firefox has never shipped JPEG XL support in a public build? Not even behind an experimental flag like Chrome did.

It's relevant because there is no doubt that Firefox would not have axed a promising open format despite users asking for it.

It is possible that FF won't continue the work of implementing it if they see no future without the oligarch in the field, but we'll see

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#153

Yay, more "fuck the long tail" from lazy-ass Google developers. Google has a gigantic pile of money. They can afford to keep JPEG XL support.

Take note: This sort of abusive comment is not persuasive. If somebody spoke that way to me, I would not listen to their suggestions, if only out of sheer spite.

Why is this manner of speaking so common?

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#154
post #150

JXL developers are understandably upset about being a victim of Worse is Better. The Web platform is hardly cutting edge here. It took 10 years to add WebP across browsers, and it wouldn't have been added at all if it didn't cause web-compat issues for non-Chrome(ium) browsers. From browsers' perspective the question isn't "is the new codec better", but "are existing codecs so terrible that they need urgent replaceme…

With your logic we should quickly remove WebP and AVIF, and have an active discussion if JPEG XL is good enough to make it. Also port as much as possible from JPEG XL tech into traditional JPEG.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get nervous when I see motion artefacts on netflix. This means I'm pretty much always nervous when watching netflix. I use a 1 gbps home connection and pay for the most expensive option netflix has. I'd like to think that the whole concept of motion frames based prediction will disappear in future videos. Motion JPEG XL would be like in the movies where they have Motion JPEG 2000, but ~35-40 % more dense. We could…

60 mbps is easily beyond the limits of many home wifi network setups, and leaves the serving end with capacity for something like 166 users per 10 Gbit port. There are many additional costs to consider beyond the size of the home pipe

I believe this capacity roughly triples every five years -- so when building something for the far future things can look different in bandwidth/quality perspective.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychovisual image quality tests are difficult and complicated. Selection of the population, methods, guiding text, motivation, etc. can lead to strange things happening. As an example of the difficulties an academy leading corpora TID2013 has a reversal in quality between categories 4 and 5 -- highest quality images seem to get slightly worse quality ratings than the next highest quality images. I observed a leading…

Yes, I agree it is incredibly hard. On the other hand, if anyone has put in the work to give the "least bad answer so far" to this question it's Jon Sneyers. I don't have time to dig through Twitter just now, but instead of just picking one image metric they've used all of them to also compare the testing methods themselves.

All my own experience and observations also suggest that Jon did an excellent job on this and is likely the first person to ever do it well with crowd-sourcing. In the past I have seen similar quality of results with hand-picked experts (image quality people, photographers etc.), but not with volunteers or crowd-sourcing.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#157

Yay, more "fuck the long tail" from lazy-ass Google developers. Google has a gigantic pile of money. They can afford to keep JPEG XL support.

Take note: This sort of abusive comment is not persuasive. If somebody spoke that way to me, I would not listen to their suggestions, if only out of sheer spite. Why is this manner of speaking so common?

This is how people actually talk. Maybe not in the gentrified ivory towers of large tech companies, but out here on the ground floor....

This "we think supporting option X is too much work" is just corporate cost-cutting translated into developer-speak that is persuasive to those with no concept of history or user-centricity

People want options and they want diversity. How much maintenance is a JPEG XL decoder in the grand scheme of Chrome's codebase? Especially when it seems to be largely finished?

Although maybe I should have put "lazy-ass product managers" instead.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#158
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Also brotli - not that its a bad format but its weird how quickly it made it into browsers without proving itself first when there have been so many general purpose compression algorithms better than gzip that were just ignored.

Brotli got into browsers quickly because W3C Web Fonts Working Group knew how to collaborate (instead of have the usual infinite quarrels :-D). I am thankful to Vladimir Levantovsky for somehow having created this atmosphere -- and of course to all the working group members.

Previously some engineers tried to bring bzip2 into content encoding, that failed by HTTP/tv-top-boxes interacting. HTTPS getting more common allowed a safer deployment route.

The W3C WG was trying to bring LZMA in, but that was just too slow for all fonts decoding -- it would have not made fonts load faster in all cases.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#159
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…

I switched to Vivaldi (based on Chrome) from Firefox a few months back and am reasonably happy with it. I get far more control over my browsing experience than with Firefox, which keeps removing features that I actually liked and used.

I used Firefox for a long time, starting way back when it was brand-new and IE was the leading browser. I continued using it because they were innovating heavily in the browser space. After they stopped innovating, I kept using it because although Chrome was impressive and fast, they kept nagging you about logging into Google. Now, based on the fact that Mozilla basically seems to just do whatever Chrome does these days, combined with the unnecessary and infuriating UX redesigns, Firefox has no obvious advantages and quite a few drawbacks.

I don't love the fact that Vivaldi is closed-source and based on Chromium but at least I feel like I'm in the driver's seat while I'm using it.

Re: The case for JPEG XL

#160
post #119
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I co-chaired the JPEG XL working group; opinions are my own. The JPEG XL format is most certainly not a nightmare internally. Compare the spec lengths: 681 pages for https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/av1-spec.pdf , 101 for https://www.iso.org/standard/77977.html . Or code sizes: 6.6 MB uncompressed for libjxl (encoder+decoder), 9.5 MB for dav1d (decoder only) plus 34.2 MB for SVT-AV1 (encoder). Feat…

> Compare the spec lengths: 681 pages for https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/av1-spec.pdf , 101 for https://www.iso.org/standard/77977.html . And here we immediately see one important difference between them: the first link is to a 681-page PDF, which opens immediately in my browser. The second link is to a place where one can buy access to what it says is a 101-page PDF, after paying more money than it would co…

> after paying more money than it would cost to buy a basic laptop

No need to be imprecise, unless you are trying to push some agenda. The cost is CHF 198, which is around USD 195.

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