Other commenters are right, licensing was a big factor, because the 1990s were marred by a few high-profile events where patents on popular formats were suddenl

Other commenters are right, licensing was a big factor, because the 1990s were marred by a few high-profile events where patents on popular formats were suddenly enforced [1]. These events led to the PNG format being developed as an alternative to GIF, and Vorbis developed as an alternative to MP3. By the time JPEG 2000 rolled around, wariness of patents was well-established. On the technical side, JP2 produced unsightly ringing distortions much more noticeably at medium compression ratios than JPEG did while also blurring detail, while JPEG would only experience ringing around sharp transitions, and would get blocking artifacts elsewhere. For some people, JPEG's blocking would impact a sort of 'fake sharpness' in the image, while JP2 would produce a blurry smudge. Dark Shikari, longtime dev on x264, wrote about this phenomenon [3], which also adversely affected early H.264 encoders and made them look worse compared to ASP (like Xvid), despite former being an objectively better format. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enfo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and_legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20141124213159/http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/317#more-317 http://web.archive.org/web/20141124213159/http://x264dev.mul...