5 ms·

JPEG and PNG are good enough. Encoders and decoders are heavily optimized and omnipresent. No patent issues (either patent-free or expired). We should focus on

JPEG and PNG are good enough. Encoders and decoders are heavily optimized and omnipresent. No patent issues (either patent-free or expired). We should focus on other more pressing issues. This one is basically solved.

devmor 3y ago
You are free to focus on whatever issues you find pressing.
Demmme 3y ago
Ah yes the ubundend fiber in rural areas around the globe. You do understand that this is not for you if you have high bandwidth and low latency right?
calpaterson 3y ago
The trouble is that images are a large fraction of the page size even for well optimised websites. Using smaller images via changing format often makes a significant difference in the page load time. It's also relatively easy for new formats to be adopted - the html picture tag makes it really easy to serve the same image in multiple formats to allow for backward compatibility. And of course image decoders are easily distributed - JXL's encoder/decoder are open source. The combination of those two factors probably means that this will never be a settled area now. It's fairly easy for websites to adopt a new format and there are strong reasons to. Means, motive and opportunity. I reckon Chrome will cave in eventually. The pressure on browser performance is intense. Unless they want to see Safari faster in benchmarks of image heavy pages they will have to adopt it.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > The trouble is that images are a large fraction of the page size even for well optimised websites. Using smaller images via changing format often makes a significant difference in the page load time. That's true, but even savvy people don't seem to care much about this. For example, (open) podcasts are still universally MP3-based even though it's been possible for many years to halve their size using modern, ubiquitous audio formats. > I reckon Chrome will cave in eventually. The pressure on browser performance is intense. Unless they want to see Safari faster in benchmarks of image heavy pages they will have to adopt it. What's curious about this to me is why Apple is single-handedly saving JPEG-XL from obscurity when AV1 is also a fine substitute for mainstream image compression use cases.
  - eviks 3y ago
    Tangentially related, some clients don't handle variable encodings well, putting another limit on efficiency improvements indeed a pity progress is so slow even in these easier cases of widely available improvements
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - zilti 3y ago
    The podcast (and audio in general) thing annoys me way more than it should. FFS, just use Opus, it is supported on virtually all devices out there and is massively smaller
    - praisewhitey 3y ago
      last I checked the iPhone podcasts app doesn't play opus. Have things changed?
      - coconut08 3y ago
        it's not just the podcasts app. ios itself doesn't support opus. i've run into this problem with plenty of other apps in ios.
        zilti 3y ago
        Well then fuck iOS
  - Flimm 3y ago
    I didn't know that about podcasts and audio formats. What format would you recommend? It would need to be well-supported by podcast players.
    - gsich 3y ago
      Opus
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  > The trouble is that images are a large fraction of the page size even for well optimised websites. Using smaller images via changing format often makes a significant difference in the page load time. Pepperidge farm remembers Google heavily pushing for WebP for this reason. Look how much smaller it is! and Lighthouse giving demerits for every non-WebP image. Which, of course, is totally true, WebP images were almost always quite a bit smaller. They all looked like shit, too, of course.
spider-mario 3y ago
High-quality HDR at reasonable bitrates is solved?
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> ... PNG are good enough. For a start it's 2023 and all browsers do support lossless webp [1]. Lossless webp (webp can be both lossy or lossless) is not only typically smaller than most optimized PNG files but also compresses faster than the optimized PNG encoders. So, basically, the main reason to use PNG in 2023 for anything Web related is if you like wasting bandwith. For 99.95% of the PNG files (something huge like that) are smaller when encoded with lossless webp. Heck, even my Emacs supports webp images. Then other formats are already knocking on the door and promise even better compression than webp. https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Not if you use MozJPEG and a decent PNG compressor, like ECT, OxiPNG, PNGCrush, etc. Time and time again an article pops up showing how marginal the difference is, if at all.
  - JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
    if you use an optimal strategy to compress PNGs, WebP lossless is still 26 % more dense if you take usual PNGs from the wild, WebP lossless is 42-45 % more dense disclaimer: I'm a co-author of Zopfli and ZopfliPNG, and usually best PNG optimizers are based on Zopfli. I'm also the author of WebP lossless.
- mlindner 3y ago
  Unless you have a large image in which case you can’t even store it in webp because of its abysmal max resolution. PNG continues to be the format of record for lossless image storage. Hopefully JPEG XL can replace it.
CodesInChaos 3y ago
PNG only produces reasonable image sizes for a very restricted category of image. And while JPEG is decent for photos, it does a pretty bad job compressing images which contain sharp edges or text. So neither is a good choice, unless you know a priori that all your images will fall into one of the categories where these formats do a decent job.
KronisLV 3y ago
> JPEG and PNG are good enough. Encoders and decoders are heavily optimized and omnipresent. No patent issues (either patent-free or expired). I think you're getting downvotes for the sentiment, but I'm inclined to agree with both this comment, as well as the one you made a bit further in the thread. > MP3 is also good enough. Modern compressors are on par with Opus, AAC or whatever is in fashion now. The format is sane, patents have expired, it run everywhere. It's not worth the trouble. Something like Ogg/Vorbis would also be under my consideration for audio files, but I find these established and somewhat out of date technologies to be surprisingly stable and reliable. The same way how for many folks out there the H.264 video codec will also suffice for almost any use case (sadly Theora never got big, but there's VP8/VP9 too). The same way how something like ZIP or 7z will be enough for most archiving needs. I think there is no harm in using these options and not sweating about having to serve every asset in whichever of the modern formats the user's browser in question might support (nor should you chase perfect quality), as well as be sure to actually convert the assets into a multitude of formats and include them in the page, as long as 90% of your hosting costs aren't caused by this very choice. Who cares if a few pixels are a bit off because you saved your JPG with a quality setting of 75 or 80? As long as your application/site does what it should, that's hardly something that most people care about, or will even notice. > We should focus on other more pressing issues. This one is basically solved. However, eventually something new is going to come out AND get stable enough to have the same widespread adoption as the current stable and dependable options. Whether that happens in a year, 5 years or a decade, only time will show (let's say, 95% of devices supporting AV1 and Opus). I think that then will be the right time to switch to these new technologies for most people, as opposed to being early adopters.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Yes, I’m in a bad mood and it probably came across a bit fatalistic. > However, eventually something new is going to come out… The thing is, human eyes and ears aren’t getting any better and computing performance seems to be plateauing. My guess is we have already reached the “good enough” point and I doubt we’ll get formats 3-4X as efficient in the future.
  - 3y ago
Osiris 3y ago
Just as ZIP is a mediocre compression algorithm that is supported basically everywhere. Today we have larger storage and faster bandwidth than ever before so it’s easy to trade off compression for ease. Same goes with mp3. Back in the day, Microsoft was touting that WMA could replicate the quality of MP3 128kbps at just 64kbps. I bought in and mass converted my entire library because of the high space savings. Now… I have a library of music that has so many artifacts in it, I can listen to it. At the time, the space saving may have been worth it but I now regret it.
- tredre3 3y ago
  Saying that DEFLATE is mediocre is absurd. There's a reason it's still in use after 30 years (and it's not merely inertia). Before zstandard arrived to the scene there was literally nothing able to achieve the same ratio as deflate without taking 10x longer. This is unlike WMA/WMV which, I agree, were pretty much already obsolete by the time they came out.
  - JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
    well, there was brotli (implemented in 2013, added to web stack in 2015) which was both faster on encode and decode fastest brotli option encodes about 3x faster than fastest zlib option
- illiac786 3y ago
  You are overseeing how demand is still increasing I believe. Faster bandwidth than ever before is met by higher demand than ever before and it will continue like this for a while. 60fps HDR 4k Content will become normal, eating away at bandwidth availability, meaning that any possible savings will still be relevant, for example in still images.
Auracle 3y ago
Jpeg literally can’t show most clear blue skies in pictures without banding due to it only being 8-Bit. The fact I need to worry about going back to re-edit them and losing quality is silly. So no, not good enough.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Learn about noise and dithering. You can have seamless blue skies with 8 bits that way. It’s more a fault of the camera applying excessive noise reduction than the format. Besides, if we’re worried about file sizes, 16 bit files are humongous.
  - JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
    jpegli is an even better option -- it adds 10+ bits in old jpeg format in its '8-bit mode'
  - Auracle 3y ago
    I know about adding noise, but to call that a solution is silly. You’re purposely degrading the image to get around the technical limitations of a 30 year old format. I disagree about the noise reduction part too. Modern (larger, not sure about cell phone) sensors basically have basically no noise at ISO 64-100 or so. It’s just an inherent limitation of only having 255 steps of brightness.
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      Dithering is a feature. It’s used all the time in audio and image. And a little bit of noise is a good thing. Two of my favorite sources on the subject: https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM?t=700 https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM?t=700 https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/05/noise-is-your-friend.html https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...
ChoHag 3y ago
[dead]

devmor 3y ago

You are free to focus on whatever issues you find pressing.

Demmme 3y ago

Ah yes the ubundend fiber in rural areas around the globe. You do understand that this is not for you if you have high bandwidth and low latency right?

calpaterson 3y ago

The trouble is that images are a large fraction of the page size even for well optimised websites. Using smaller images via changing format often makes a significant difference in the page load time. It's also relatively easy for new formats to be adopted - the html picture tag makes it really easy to serve the same image in multiple formats to allow for backward compatibility. And of course image decoders are easily distributed - JXL's encoder/decoder are open source. The combination of those two factors probably means that this will never be a settled area now. It's fairly easy for websites to adopt a new format and there are strong reasons to. Means, motive and opportunity. I reckon Chrome will cave in eventually. The pressure on browser performance is intense. Unless they want to see Safari faster in benchmarks of image heavy pages they will have to adopt it.

CharlesW 3y ago
> The trouble is that images are a large fraction of the page size even for well optimised websites. Using smaller images via changing format often makes a significant difference in the page load time. That's true, but even savvy people don't seem to care much about this. For example, (open) podcasts are still universally MP3-based even though it's been possible for many years to halve their size using modern, ubiquitous audio formats. > I reckon Chrome will cave in eventually. The pressure on browser performance is intense. Unless they want to see Safari faster in benchmarks of image heavy pages they will have to adopt it. What's curious about this to me is why Apple is single-handedly saving JPEG-XL from obscurity when AV1 is also a fine substitute for mainstream image compression use cases.
- eviks 3y ago
  Tangentially related, some clients don't handle variable encodings well, putting another limit on efficiency improvements indeed a pity progress is so slow even in these easier cases of widely available improvements
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- zilti 3y ago
  The podcast (and audio in general) thing annoys me way more than it should. FFS, just use Opus, it is supported on virtually all devices out there and is massively smaller
  - praisewhitey 3y ago
    last I checked the iPhone podcasts app doesn't play opus. Have things changed?
    - coconut08 3y ago
      it's not just the podcasts app. ios itself doesn't support opus. i've run into this problem with plenty of other apps in ios.
      - zilti 3y ago
        Well then fuck iOS
- Flimm 3y ago
  I didn't know that about podcasts and audio formats. What format would you recommend? It would need to be well-supported by podcast players.
  - gsich 3y ago
    Opus
formerly_proven 3y ago
> The trouble is that images are a large fraction of the page size even for well optimised websites. Using smaller images via changing format often makes a significant difference in the page load time. Pepperidge farm remembers Google heavily pushing for WebP for this reason. Look how much smaller it is! and Lighthouse giving demerits for every non-WebP image. Which, of course, is totally true, WebP images were almost always quite a bit smaller. They all looked like shit, too, of course.

spider-mario 3y ago

High-quality HDR at reasonable bitrates is solved?

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> ... PNG are good enough. For a start it's 2023 and all browsers do support lossless webp [1]. Lossless webp (webp can be both lossy or lossless) is not only typically smaller than most optimized PNG files but also compresses faster than the optimized PNG encoders. So, basically, the main reason to use PNG in 2023 for anything Web related is if you like wasting bandwith. For 99.95% of the PNG files (something huge like that) are smaller when encoded with lossless webp. Heck, even my Emacs supports webp images. Then other formats are already knocking on the door and promise even better compression than webp. https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp

tambourine_man 3y ago
Not if you use MozJPEG and a decent PNG compressor, like ECT, OxiPNG, PNGCrush, etc. Time and time again an article pops up showing how marginal the difference is, if at all.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
  if you use an optimal strategy to compress PNGs, WebP lossless is still 26 % more dense if you take usual PNGs from the wild, WebP lossless is 42-45 % more dense disclaimer: I'm a co-author of Zopfli and ZopfliPNG, and usually best PNG optimizers are based on Zopfli. I'm also the author of WebP lossless.
mlindner 3y ago
Unless you have a large image in which case you can’t even store it in webp because of its abysmal max resolution. PNG continues to be the format of record for lossless image storage. Hopefully JPEG XL can replace it.

CodesInChaos 3y ago

PNG only produces reasonable image sizes for a very restricted category of image. And while JPEG is decent for photos, it does a pretty bad job compressing images which contain sharp edges or text. So neither is a good choice, unless you know a priori that all your images will fall into one of the categories where these formats do a decent job.

KronisLV 3y ago

> JPEG and PNG are good enough. Encoders and decoders are heavily optimized and omnipresent. No patent issues (either patent-free or expired). I think you're getting downvotes for the sentiment, but I'm inclined to agree with both this comment, as well as the one you made a bit further in the thread. > MP3 is also good enough. Modern compressors are on par with Opus, AAC or whatever is in fashion now. The format is sane, patents have expired, it run everywhere. It's not worth the trouble. Something like Ogg/Vorbis would also be under my consideration for audio files, but I find these established and somewhat out of date technologies to be surprisingly stable and reliable. The same way how for many folks out there the H.264 video codec will also suffice for almost any use case (sadly Theora never got big, but there's VP8/VP9 too). The same way how something like ZIP or 7z will be enough for most archiving needs. I think there is no harm in using these options and not sweating about having to serve every asset in whichever of the modern formats the user's browser in question might support (nor should you chase perfect quality), as well as be sure to actually convert the assets into a multitude of formats and include them in the page, as long as 90% of your hosting costs aren't caused by this very choice. Who cares if a few pixels are a bit off because you saved your JPG with a quality setting of 75 or 80? As long as your application/site does what it should, that's hardly something that most people care about, or will even notice. > We should focus on other more pressing issues. This one is basically solved. However, eventually something new is going to come out AND get stable enough to have the same widespread adoption as the current stable and dependable options. Whether that happens in a year, 5 years or a decade, only time will show (let's say, 95% of devices supporting AV1 and Opus). I think that then will be the right time to switch to these new technologies for most people, as opposed to being early adopters.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Yes, I’m in a bad mood and it probably came across a bit fatalistic. > However, eventually something new is going to come out… The thing is, human eyes and ears aren’t getting any better and computing performance seems to be plateauing. My guess is we have already reached the “good enough” point and I doubt we’ll get formats 3-4X as efficient in the future.
- 3y ago

Osiris 3y ago

Just as ZIP is a mediocre compression algorithm that is supported basically everywhere. Today we have larger storage and faster bandwidth than ever before so it’s easy to trade off compression for ease. Same goes with mp3. Back in the day, Microsoft was touting that WMA could replicate the quality of MP3 128kbps at just 64kbps. I bought in and mass converted my entire library because of the high space savings. Now… I have a library of music that has so many artifacts in it, I can listen to it. At the time, the space saving may have been worth it but I now regret it.

tredre3 3y ago
Saying that DEFLATE is mediocre is absurd. There's a reason it's still in use after 30 years (and it's not merely inertia). Before zstandard arrived to the scene there was literally nothing able to achieve the same ratio as deflate without taking 10x longer. This is unlike WMA/WMV which, I agree, were pretty much already obsolete by the time they came out.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
  well, there was brotli (implemented in 2013, added to web stack in 2015) which was both faster on encode and decode fastest brotli option encodes about 3x faster than fastest zlib option
illiac786 3y ago
You are overseeing how demand is still increasing I believe. Faster bandwidth than ever before is met by higher demand than ever before and it will continue like this for a while. 60fps HDR 4k Content will become normal, eating away at bandwidth availability, meaning that any possible savings will still be relevant, for example in still images.

Auracle 3y ago

Jpeg literally can’t show most clear blue skies in pictures without banding due to it only being 8-Bit. The fact I need to worry about going back to re-edit them and losing quality is silly. So no, not good enough.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Learn about noise and dithering. You can have seamless blue skies with 8 bits that way. It’s more a fault of the camera applying excessive noise reduction than the format. Besides, if we’re worried about file sizes, 16 bit files are humongous.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
  jpegli is an even better option -- it adds 10+ bits in old jpeg format in its '8-bit mode'
- Auracle 3y ago
  I know about adding noise, but to call that a solution is silly. You’re purposely degrading the image to get around the technical limitations of a 30 year old format. I disagree about the noise reduction part too. Modern (larger, not sure about cell phone) sensors basically have basically no noise at ISO 64-100 or so. It’s just an inherent limitation of only having 255 steps of brightness.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Dithering is a feature. It’s used all the time in audio and image. And a little bit of noise is a good thing. Two of my favorite sources on the subject: https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM?t=700 https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM?t=700 https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/05/noise-is-your-friend.html https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...

ChoHag 3y ago

[dead]