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JPEG XL looks like a great format, I hope it takes over. I get that most bandwidth goes to video, but it would still be nice to have a great modern standard fo

JPEG XL looks like a great format, I hope it takes over. I get that most bandwidth goes to video, but it would still be nice to have a great modern standard for images.

FoxBJK 3y ago
I think Google's answer to that is WebP.
- account42 3y ago
  Good joke.
- pornel 3y ago
  If anything, it'd be AVIF. WebP is obsolete. It's still based on VP8 codec, which in video has been replaced by VP9 long time ago. AVIF is based on AV1, which is a successor to VP10. So WebP is a few generations behind in the VPx lineage, and is no match for modern codecs.
  - JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
    AVIF was a quick hack originally by Netflix by placing an AV1 frame into a HEIC container. I believe it was done in a few weeks of work. AV1 was largely based on VP9/VP10 and was developed by a team working in Chrome organization. JPEG XL main mode (VarDCT) and the JPEG recompression is largely developed by Google Research. WebP as a format was based on VP8, a video codec built by On2 Technologies. On2 was bought by Google in 2010 -- a year before Google published WebP. The transparency and lossless encoding as well as non-video keyframe-by-keyframe animation were designed at Google. The On2 VP8 codec used initially in WebP lossy was not that suitable (too many artefacts) for photography transmission. Jeff Muizelaar wrote a great blog post about this. The codec for WebP were redesigned (without format) changes at Google, and kept improving significantly until around 2015 when it reached pretty good maturity. (Personally, I don't like what it does to highly saturated dark colors, such as dark forests or dark red textures, but it is much much better than it was.)
  - stavros 3y ago
    We haven't even switched to WebP yet, and it's already obsolete? What hope is there for anything?
    - buttersbrian 3y ago
      "switched to"? There's no full switch to anything. Webp has been around for over a decade. AVIF will probably get adoption as a faster rate in my estimation.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      I switched to WebP about a year and a half ago. I’d been watching for a long time and it had finally reached the point where support was universal enough that I could not publish a JPEG. WebP has the big advantage that the quality setting is meaningful, you can set it at a certain level and then encode thousands of images and know the quality is about the same. This is by no means true about JPEG, if you are trying to balance quality and size you find you have to manually set the compression level on each image. Years back I was concerned about the size of a large JPEG collection and recompressed them which was a big mistake because many of the images were compressed too hard. In 2023 I think you can just use WebP and it will work well, my experience looking at images is that AVIF does better for moderate to low quality images but for high quality images it doesn’t really beat WebP.
      - account42 3y ago
        a) This is a property of the encoder, not of the image format. and b) Like any other video codec-based format, webp overcompresses dark areas in images so no, you can't rely on consistent quality across collections of arbitrary images.
      - buttersbrian 3y ago
        This image is helpful to see how they all kinda stack up, feature wise. https://archive.smashing.media/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/b3e168f7-0c9a-46dc-be3d-bd379be6ad7b/modern-image-formats-3.png https://archive.smashing.media/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb...
  - jokoon 3y ago
    avif still has patents I think?
    - pornel 3y ago
      AV1 is licensed royalty-free with an alliance of all big tech behind it. AVIF has been shipped by Apple and Google. There's always going to be FUD around software patents, because the system is broken, but AVIF is as good as possible in the pathological system.

JPEG XL looks like a great format, I hope it takes over. I get that most bandwidth goes to video, but it would still be nice to have a great modern standard for images.

FoxBJK 3y ago

I think Google's answer to that is WebP.

account42 3y ago
Good joke.
pornel 3y ago
If anything, it'd be AVIF. WebP is obsolete. It's still based on VP8 codec, which in video has been replaced by VP9 long time ago. AVIF is based on AV1, which is a successor to VP10. So WebP is a few generations behind in the VPx lineage, and is no match for modern codecs.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
  AVIF was a quick hack originally by Netflix by placing an AV1 frame into a HEIC container. I believe it was done in a few weeks of work. AV1 was largely based on VP9/VP10 and was developed by a team working in Chrome organization. JPEG XL main mode (VarDCT) and the JPEG recompression is largely developed by Google Research. WebP as a format was based on VP8, a video codec built by On2 Technologies. On2 was bought by Google in 2010 -- a year before Google published WebP. The transparency and lossless encoding as well as non-video keyframe-by-keyframe animation were designed at Google. The On2 VP8 codec used initially in WebP lossy was not that suitable (too many artefacts) for photography transmission. Jeff Muizelaar wrote a great blog post about this. The codec for WebP were redesigned (without format) changes at Google, and kept improving significantly until around 2015 when it reached pretty good maturity. (Personally, I don't like what it does to highly saturated dark colors, such as dark forests or dark red textures, but it is much much better than it was.)
- stavros 3y ago
  We haven't even switched to WebP yet, and it's already obsolete? What hope is there for anything?
  - buttersbrian 3y ago
    "switched to"? There's no full switch to anything. Webp has been around for over a decade. AVIF will probably get adoption as a faster rate in my estimation.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I switched to WebP about a year and a half ago. I’d been watching for a long time and it had finally reached the point where support was universal enough that I could not publish a JPEG. WebP has the big advantage that the quality setting is meaningful, you can set it at a certain level and then encode thousands of images and know the quality is about the same. This is by no means true about JPEG, if you are trying to balance quality and size you find you have to manually set the compression level on each image. Years back I was concerned about the size of a large JPEG collection and recompressed them which was a big mistake because many of the images were compressed too hard. In 2023 I think you can just use WebP and it will work well, my experience looking at images is that AVIF does better for moderate to low quality images but for high quality images it doesn’t really beat WebP.
    - account42 3y ago
      a) This is a property of the encoder, not of the image format. and b) Like any other video codec-based format, webp overcompresses dark areas in images so no, you can't rely on consistent quality across collections of arbitrary images.
    - buttersbrian 3y ago
      This image is helpful to see how they all kinda stack up, feature wise. https://archive.smashing.media/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/b3e168f7-0c9a-46dc-be3d-bd379be6ad7b/modern-image-formats-3.png https://archive.smashing.media/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb...
- jokoon 3y ago
  avif still has patents I think?
  - pornel 3y ago
    AV1 is licensed royalty-free with an alliance of all big tech behind it. AVIF has been shipped by Apple and Google. There's always going to be FUD around software patents, because the system is broken, but AVIF is as good as possible in the pathological system.