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The problem with trying to replace JPEG is that for most people it's "good enough". We already had "JPEG 2000", which would have been a step up in terms of perf

The problem with trying to replace JPEG is that for most people it's "good enough". We already had "JPEG 2000", which would have been a step up in terms of performance, but it never saw any real adoption. Meanwhile, "JPEG XL" is at best an incremental improvement over "JPEG 2000" from the user's POV, which raises the question why people would care about this if they didn't about the previous one.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pgeorgi 3y ago
JPEG2000 ran into a patent license trap. JPEG XL is explicitly royalty free.
- rwmj 3y ago
  But that doesn't address the point that JPEG XL is only marginally better and has a gigantic mountain to climb if it ever hopes to displace JPEG (and likely never will given the vast set of JPEG files that exist and will never be converted).
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    JPEG XL can losslessy transcode JPEG into a smaller format. JPEG2000 (or WebP or anything but Lepton[0]) didn't offer that. Besides, we have gif and png for approximately the same space. gif still isn't gone. Displacement isn't necessary for a new format to become useful. [0] https://github.com/dropbox/lepton https://github.com/dropbox/lepton
  - fold3 3y ago
    Even if JPEG-XL could be considered only 'marginally' better than JPEG, and as good or even worse than avif/webP in some specific context, it is unique in the fact that it can also do lossless, HDR, extremely high res, complex color channels, generation loss protection, multi layers, advanced authoring features, etc... It's not a format only meant for the web but plenty of other use cases such as in science, medecine, art print, etc. And not only that, it's reasonably fast to encode on consumer hardware. JPEG XL has the ambition to supplant all the images formats of the next 20+years.
  - ksec 3y ago
    > JPEG XL is only marginally better You will have to define what is marginally better. WebP is definitely marginally better than JPEG. And JPEG XL is easily 30- 40% BD-Rate at the same quality at BPP 0.8 or over.
dale_glass 3y ago
JPEG 2000 had very bad implementations for a long time. Second Life went with JPEG2000 for textures, and when they open sourced the client, they had to switch to an open source library that was dog slow. Going into a new area pretty much froze the client for several minutes until the textures finally got decoded.
BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
On top of not being backward compatible, JPEG 2000 was significantly slower and required more RAM to decode, which at the time it was released was a much bigger deal than that is today. And for all of its technical improvements for some domains (transparency, large images without tiling, multiple color spaces), it was not substantially better at compressing images with high contrast edges and high texture frequency regions at low bitrates because it just replaced JPEG's block artifacts with its own substantial smoothing and ringing artifacts.
ktosobcy 3y ago
Majority of the usual users wouldn't even notice (save for possibly faster page load). JPEG XL has mostly only benefits - backward compatible, can be converted without loss to and from, has better compresión thus smaller sizes and less data to transfer/store and it has nice licensing. JPEG2000 had nothing of that...
- acdha 3y ago
  > JPEG2000 had nothing of that... That’s not true. JPEG 200 had substantially smaller file sizes and better progressive decoding – something like responsive images could have just been an attribute telling your browser how many bytes to request for a given resolution. It also had numerous technical benefits for certain types of images - one codec could handle bitonal images more efficiently than GIF, lossless compressed better than TIFF, effortlessly handle colorspaces and bit depths we’re just starting to use on the web, etc. What doomed it was clumsy attempts to extract as much license revenue as possible. The companies behind it assumed adoption was inevitable so everything was expensive - pay thousands for the spec, commercial codecs charged pretty high rates, etc. and everyone was so busy pfaffing around with that that they forgot to work on things like interoperability or performance until the 2010s. Faced with paying money to deal with that, most people didn’t and the market moved on with only a few exceptions like certain medical imaging or archival image applications. In the early 2000s the cost of storage and disk/network bandwidth meant you could maybe try to see the numbers as plausibly break-even but over time that faded while the hassle of dealing with the format did not.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
The big reason is that JPEG XL is a seamless migration/lossless conversion from JPEG. You get better compression and services can deliver multiple resolutions/qualities from the same stored image (reducing storage or compute costs), all transparent to the user. So your average user will not care but your cloud and web service companies will. They are going to want to adopt this tech once there's widespread support so they can reduce operating costs.
yread 3y ago
There is also JPEG-XR! Life is confusing
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  JPEG XR started off as a Microsoft format about 20 years ago, but no one trusted them to not sue if reimplemented. Microsoft supported XR, but almost nothing else did.
  - tjalfi 3y ago
    They gave up on it too. Internet Explorer was the last browser to support JPEG XR.
- infinet 3y ago
  Image file generated by Zeiss microscope uses JPEG XR.
  - yread 3y ago
    Yes, I wonder if they got a good deal from MS or why is that. Most of the other vendors went with JP2000 (Aperio, Olympus even Motic)
IshKebab 3y ago
Yes if it was just about compression ratio nobody would bother, but that's not it's only feature.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  Even if it could only encode JPG into a smaller format losslessly it would still be a major selling point that basically everyone in at least the e-commerce world would want. Think about how many hundreds of terabytes of JPG files eBay and Alibaba send per day, and cut that size in half for no quality loss. Amazon alone sold over 375 million items this last Prime Day. Let’s say that was 200 million items loaded/day (ignoring the unpublished number of failed sales), with 9 images (the maximum from a cursory glance) at 2000x2000 for a 1:1 ratio and zoomability. For a 90% quality JPG at 24-bit color that’s 410KB. ((410KBx9)200,000,000) = 738TB. Now imagine cutting that in half with no perceptive difference except faster loading to the end-user. For end users the other options may be more desirable, but I would argue the importance is in the compression itself.
The_Colonel 3y ago
It's actually pretty rare how successful and long-lasting JPEG has been when you think about it. Relatively simple, elegant compression, but still quite sufficient. (Having said that I do wish for JPEG XL to become a true successor)
- mappu 3y ago
  JPEG was, and remains, "alien technology from the future" (Tim Terriberry)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pgeorgi 3y ago

JPEG2000 ran into a patent license trap. JPEG XL is explicitly royalty free.

rwmj 3y ago
But that doesn't address the point that JPEG XL is only marginally better and has a gigantic mountain to climb if it ever hopes to displace JPEG (and likely never will given the vast set of JPEG files that exist and will never be converted).
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  JPEG XL can losslessy transcode JPEG into a smaller format. JPEG2000 (or WebP or anything but Lepton[0]) didn't offer that. Besides, we have gif and png for approximately the same space. gif still isn't gone. Displacement isn't necessary for a new format to become useful. [0] https://github.com/dropbox/lepton https://github.com/dropbox/lepton
- fold3 3y ago
  Even if JPEG-XL could be considered only 'marginally' better than JPEG, and as good or even worse than avif/webP in some specific context, it is unique in the fact that it can also do lossless, HDR, extremely high res, complex color channels, generation loss protection, multi layers, advanced authoring features, etc... It's not a format only meant for the web but plenty of other use cases such as in science, medecine, art print, etc. And not only that, it's reasonably fast to encode on consumer hardware. JPEG XL has the ambition to supplant all the images formats of the next 20+years.
- ksec 3y ago
  > JPEG XL is only marginally better You will have to define what is marginally better. WebP is definitely marginally better than JPEG. And JPEG XL is easily 30- 40% BD-Rate at the same quality at BPP 0.8 or over.

dale_glass 3y ago

JPEG 2000 had very bad implementations for a long time. Second Life went with JPEG2000 for textures, and when they open sourced the client, they had to switch to an open source library that was dog slow. Going into a new area pretty much froze the client for several minutes until the textures finally got decoded.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago

On top of not being backward compatible, JPEG 2000 was significantly slower and required more RAM to decode, which at the time it was released was a much bigger deal than that is today. And for all of its technical improvements for some domains (transparency, large images without tiling, multiple color spaces), it was not substantially better at compressing images with high contrast edges and high texture frequency regions at low bitrates because it just replaced JPEG's block artifacts with its own substantial smoothing and ringing artifacts.

ktosobcy 3y ago

Majority of the usual users wouldn't even notice (save for possibly faster page load). JPEG XL has mostly only benefits - backward compatible, can be converted without loss to and from, has better compresión thus smaller sizes and less data to transfer/store and it has nice licensing. JPEG2000 had nothing of that...

acdha 3y ago
> JPEG2000 had nothing of that... That’s not true. JPEG 200 had substantially smaller file sizes and better progressive decoding – something like responsive images could have just been an attribute telling your browser how many bytes to request for a given resolution. It also had numerous technical benefits for certain types of images - one codec could handle bitonal images more efficiently than GIF, lossless compressed better than TIFF, effortlessly handle colorspaces and bit depths we’re just starting to use on the web, etc. What doomed it was clumsy attempts to extract as much license revenue as possible. The companies behind it assumed adoption was inevitable so everything was expensive - pay thousands for the spec, commercial codecs charged pretty high rates, etc. and everyone was so busy pfaffing around with that that they forgot to work on things like interoperability or performance until the 2010s. Faced with paying money to deal with that, most people didn’t and the market moved on with only a few exceptions like certain medical imaging or archival image applications. In the early 2000s the cost of storage and disk/network bandwidth meant you could maybe try to see the numbers as plausibly break-even but over time that faded while the hassle of dealing with the format did not.

CuriousCosmic 3y ago

The big reason is that JPEG XL is a seamless migration/lossless conversion from JPEG. You get better compression and services can deliver multiple resolutions/qualities from the same stored image (reducing storage or compute costs), all transparent to the user. So your average user will not care but your cloud and web service companies will. They are going to want to adopt this tech once there's widespread support so they can reduce operating costs.

yread 3y ago

There is also JPEG-XR! Life is confusing

theandrewbailey 3y ago
JPEG XR started off as a Microsoft format about 20 years ago, but no one trusted them to not sue if reimplemented. Microsoft supported XR, but almost nothing else did.
- tjalfi 3y ago
  They gave up on it too. Internet Explorer was the last browser to support JPEG XR.
infinet 3y ago
Image file generated by Zeiss microscope uses JPEG XR.
- yread 3y ago
  Yes, I wonder if they got a good deal from MS or why is that. Most of the other vendors went with JP2000 (Aperio, Olympus even Motic)

IshKebab 3y ago

Yes if it was just about compression ratio nobody would bother, but that's not it's only feature.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago
Even if it could only encode JPG into a smaller format losslessly it would still be a major selling point that basically everyone in at least the e-commerce world would want. Think about how many hundreds of terabytes of JPG files eBay and Alibaba send per day, and cut that size in half for no quality loss. Amazon alone sold over 375 million items this last Prime Day. Let’s say that was 200 million items loaded/day (ignoring the unpublished number of failed sales), with 9 images (the maximum from a cursory glance) at 2000x2000 for a 1:1 ratio and zoomability. For a 90% quality JPG at 24-bit color that’s 410KB. ((410KBx9)200,000,000) = 738TB. Now imagine cutting that in half with no perceptive difference except faster loading to the end-user. For end users the other options may be more desirable, but I would argue the importance is in the compression itself.

The_Colonel 3y ago

It's actually pretty rare how successful and long-lasting JPEG has been when you think about it. Relatively simple, elegant compression, but still quite sufficient. (Having said that I do wish for JPEG XL to become a true successor)

mappu 3y ago
JPEG was, and remains, "alien technology from the future" (Tim Terriberry)