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The patent situation was exacerbated by the fact that JPEG2000 started getting pushed right about the time the GIF patent situation blew up so everybody was rel

The patent situation was exacerbated by the fact that JPEG2000 started getting pushed right about the time the GIF patent situation blew up so everybody was reluctant have a repeat disaster. Add in the fact that JPEG2000 showed at best a marginal improvement over JPEG and it's not hard to just stick with the proven technology. Having no good reference implementation is just a nail in the coffin.

acdha 5y ago
I would describe JPEG-2000 as more than a marginal improvement over JPEG: it's one format which supports lossless and lossy compression, it compresses a good bit better and the artifacts are less visually distracting, has better progressive streaming, and full support for variable bit depth and colorspaces. If you look at it technically, it'll win on just about every point. Unfortunately for the standard, most of the people involved assumed that was enough to make adoption inevitable. I think it could have gone down a different path if, say, someone had released a high-quality open source version or worked with e.g. Netscape/Mozilla to integrate it into web browsers but that would have basically meant scaling back the older dream of making a profitable business around a single component like an image codec.
- dvhh 5y ago
  But compression time were atrocious and decoder were not as fast as the jpeg one (at the time). Marginal support from tool/browser didn't help boost its popularity, and patent situation as pointed in parent comment just shut the coffin on this otherwise ok format. At the time vanilla jpeg had compression artifact and had worst compression rate, but was good enough at the time, even now because of its ubiquity the "successors" are still having a hard time dethroning jpeg.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Exactly: it seems like a classic “Worse is better” situation where JPEG 2000 is basically better across the board on features but none of that mattered as much as being widespread and fast enough. Something like TIFF or BMP wouldn't have been able to do the same since the file sizes are so much larger that they'd have had a noticeable impact on usability but JPEG was far over the “good enough” bar for most users.
    - dvhh 5y ago
      I think facebook even had a backlash when it tried to switch to webp for serving image
      - acdha 5y ago
        Yes - anything which breaks “save as” is going to hit backlash. However, as a counter example Apple’s HEIC deployment has been smoother since it works for users when it transparently transcodes shares outside of the ecosystem with HEIC support.

acdha 5y ago

I would describe JPEG-2000 as more than a marginal improvement over JPEG: it's one format which supports lossless and lossy compression, it compresses a good bit better and the artifacts are less visually distracting, has better progressive streaming, and full support for variable bit depth and colorspaces. If you look at it technically, it'll win on just about every point. Unfortunately for the standard, most of the people involved assumed that was enough to make adoption inevitable. I think it could have gone down a different path if, say, someone had released a high-quality open source version or worked with e.g. Netscape/Mozilla to integrate it into web browsers but that would have basically meant scaling back the older dream of making a profitable business around a single component like an image codec.

dvhh 5y ago
But compression time were atrocious and decoder were not as fast as the jpeg one (at the time). Marginal support from tool/browser didn't help boost its popularity, and patent situation as pointed in parent comment just shut the coffin on this otherwise ok format. At the time vanilla jpeg had compression artifact and had worst compression rate, but was good enough at the time, even now because of its ubiquity the "successors" are still having a hard time dethroning jpeg.
- acdha 5y ago
  Exactly: it seems like a classic “Worse is better” situation where JPEG 2000 is basically better across the board on features but none of that mattered as much as being widespread and fast enough. Something like TIFF or BMP wouldn't have been able to do the same since the file sizes are so much larger that they'd have had a noticeable impact on usability but JPEG was far over the “good enough” bar for most users.
  - dvhh 5y ago
    I think facebook even had a backlash when it tried to switch to webp for serving image
    - acdha 5y ago
      Yes - anything which breaks “save as” is going to hit backlash. However, as a counter example Apple’s HEIC deployment has been smoother since it works for users when it transparently transcodes shares outside of the ecosystem with HEIC support.