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To increase adoption they should not have limited this to the latest iPhone models. Why on earth can a one year old iPhone 15’s CPU not handle encoding JXL? It
by b15h0p 2y ago
To increase adoption they should not have limited this to the latest iPhone models. Why on earth can a one year old iPhone 15’s CPU not handle encoding JXL? It can encode 4K video in real time, so this should be no problem at all, right?
- NinoScript 2y agoI’d guess hardware acceleration could have something to do with it
- JyrkiAlakuijala 2y agoI don't know, but my guesswork is that the DNG/ProRAW/JXL support comes with compatibility challenges. Limiting the size of the launch to well-informed photography prosumers and professionals will help to iron out the compatibility challenges — rather than make all confused consumers face these challenges at once. I don't think that hardware support plays a role here. The fastest encoding modes of JPEG XL are ridiculously fast on software, and Apple's CPUs seem powerful enough.
- Nanopolygon 2y agoIn lossy mode I think there is no difference between AVIF, HEIC or JXL. AVIF is even a little bit ahead. For lossless mode, JXL's fast modes (-e1 and -e2) are fast. But their compression ratio is terrible. The higher levels are not usable in a camera in terms of speed. Of course, my favorite and many people's favorite in this regard is HALIC (High Availability Lossless Image Compression). It is a speed/compression monster. The problem is that for now it is closed source and there is no Google or similar company behind it.
- lonjil 2y ago> In lossy mode I think there is no difference between AVIF, HEIC or JXL. AVIF is even a little bit ahead. AVIF is definitely not ahead for the high quality levels you'd use in photography. AVIF is ahead at lower quality levels. > For lossless mode, JXL's fast modes (-e1 and -e2) are fast. But their compression ratio is terrible. JXL lossless e1 is still a lot better than the lossless compression people tend to use for photos these days. Like Apple has been using Lossless JPEG, which sucks.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 2y agoAgreed. At camera quality jpeg xl is far ahead in quality. Apple's last announcement is about camera quality, close to lossless kind of lossy. In this domain jpeg xl does not have real competition. AVIF and HEIC don't even support more than 12 bits of dynamics, and become slow when quality is increased.
- ksec 2y ago>AVIF is definitely not ahead for the high quality levels you'd use in photography. I read the parent's point of comparison in terms of speed, not quality.
- jonsneyers 2y agoLast time I tested, libjxl e1 had a better compression ratio than default libpng, while being two orders of magnitude faster. See https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front#the_pareto_front https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front#the... The point of reference here is not PNG but lossless JPEG, which was the best available option in DNG before version 1.7 of the DNG spec. Lossless JPEG compresses worse (but faster) than PNG. I don't know how HALIC works but if there is no FOSS implementation available that seems like a no-go.
- the4anoni 2y agoThis, I just don't understand why it seems only latest iPhones got this.
- rob74 2y agoI also don't know, but I suspect the fact that Apple not only develops the OS, but also sells the devices, might have something to do with it...
- 0points 2y agoCrystal clear case of faked obsolescence, a major cause for environmental damage. Costing the planet our future sustainability in the name of greed. And all you have to say about it is a snark?
- Gud 2y agoThis is not “fake obsolence”. Your old devices works exactly how they did before.
- pooper 2y agoI will give you another unrelated example to demonstrate fake obsolescence on an iPhone. For example, on the iPhone 13 Pro Max, You cannot set the battery to stop charging at 80%. You can do this with the new iPhone. I don't remember either 14 or 15, but you can't do this with the 13 Pro Max. So can you say that the iPhone 13 Promax is actually supported for so many years with the latest and greatest iOS When apple doesn't actually bring these new features. Back to the older version of iPhone?
- brigade 2y agoThe CPU isn’t used for encoding video
- LtdJorge 2y agoEncoding a single image with the CPU takes nothing compared to modern video codecs.
- brigade 2y agoBurst mode captures 10 images per second, for encode demands of 120 MP/s. That’s half the throughput of 4k30.
- lupusreal 2y agoIs there a cool down between bursts or can you do 10 a second for as many consecutive seconds as you like? You only have to get the images encoded and stored before the next burst starts, or at least before the user runs out of memory.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoI’ve done bursts that lasted for 2 minutes.
- lonjil 2y agoThere's literally no way Apple developed a hardware accelerator for JXL encoding. So they're definitely using some kind of a CPU or generic DSP.
- JyrkiAlakuijala 2y agoThey might have some things like DCTs and colorspace transforms accelerated.
- cchi_co 2y agoIt does seem odd to restrict new features to the latest models, especially when older ones still have powerful capabilities.
- Asmod4n 2y agoIt’s good in a corporate setting, you don’t want to suddenly have to deal with a new file format for which you won’t have an app installed on your company PCs to view them.
- alwillis 2y agoApple announced support for JPEG XL last year at WWDC; Apple's 1st party apps supported JPEG XL when iOS 17 shipped: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10122 https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10122 Regarding older hardware, I addressed that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41611709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41611709
- WhyNotHugo 2y agoThis is how they sell new phones. The grand majority of new features don't require the latest hardware, but artificially restricting it increases sales of new phones. None technical people can't usually tell the difference between hardware and software clearly enough to understand this nasty trick.
- illiac786 2y agoTo be fair it’s less bad than what some other vendors are doing, which is stopping to provide updates. Not saying apple is an angel, they intentionally generate ewaste by withholding such features…
- danielheath 2y agoI spend a lot of time using my phone, and can afford the latest & greatest - but I use a 6 year old apple phone, because it's _perfectly fine_. A 10 year old apple phone is "just barely usable". When I was in the android ecosystem, a 4 year old phone was "just barely" usable, and phones stopped being "fine" after about two years. I'll give apple shit for a lot of things, and they could definitely do _more_ about e-waste... but this is as likely to be "we put the image encoder on the camera module, so it would have been slightly more work to backport to old phones"
- marcellus23 2y agoI don't think anyone is deciding to buy a new phone or not based on JPEG XL support.
- jiggawatts 2y agoOne of the tricks for achieving the target battery life is that photo and video formats are offloaded to dedicated and very power-efficient hardware in all mobile devices. The iPhone 16 is the first to get hardware offload for AV1 and JXL, which is why it'll support these formats. It's not just software, unlike in the PC world where going from 5W hardware decode to 50W software decode basically doesn't matter.
- illiac786 2y agoIs that documented somewhere?
- account42 2y agoThe "CPU" (that is, the generic compute part) cannot encode 4K video in real time, that part is handle by codec-specific HW.
- lonjil 2y agoThey aren't doing JXL encoding in hardware though. Zero chance that the new iPhone chip has hardware acceleration for JXL. Definitely just plain old CPU encoding. And we're not talking about video anyway, this is about ProRAW, a still image format.
- danielheath 2y ago> Zero chance that the new iPhone chip has hardware acceleration for JXL. Definitely just plain old CPU encoding. Given apple design their own camera controllers and have their own chip design teams, I wouldn't be nearly so quick to conclude that.
- FollowingTheDao 2y agoThis makes me think: If JPEG-XL needs more computing power to decompress, does that out weigh the ecological benefit benefit of the smaller file size?
- pornel 2y agoJPEG XL is pretty cheap to decompress. Advancements in compression algorithms also came with advancements in decompression speed. New algorithms like tANS are both compressing well, and have very fast implementations. And generally smaller files decompress faster, because there's just less data to process.
- FollowingTheDao 2y agoBut how does the ecological benefit of space savings compare with the extra power consumption from compressing and decompressing? And will people take more pictures because of the space savings leading to more power consumption from compressing and decompressing the photos? Is this just greenwashing by Apple? But I have now decided to take my photos off of Apple's servers as well as to take way way less photographs, if any. The climate of my near future is way more important than a photograph of my cat.
- pornel 2y agoYou have an invalid assumption that extra power is spent on better compression or decompression. It generally takes less energy to decompress a better-compressed file, because the decompression work is mostly proportional to the file size. Energy for compression varies greatly depending on codec and settings, but JPEG XL is among the fastest (cheapest) ones to compress. Secondly, you have an invalid assumption that the amounts of energy spent on compression have any real-world significance. Phones can take thousands of photos when working off a tiny battery, and most of it is spent on the screen. My rough calculation is that taking over a million photos takes less energy than there is in a gallon of gas. Apart form that, compression cost is generally completely ignored, because files are created only once, but viewed (decompressed) many many times over. Smaller files save storage space. Storage has costs in energy and hardware. Smaller files are quicker to transfer, and transfer itself can be more energy intensive than compression. It's still small in absolute numbers.
- alwillis 2y agoFrom the article: As Apple explains on the new iPhone models, JPEG XL files are supported on iOS 17 and later and macOS 14 and later. JPEG XL isn't limited to the latest phones; just a phone that can run iOS 17 or later. I have used JPEG XL on my iPhone 13 mini with no issues. iOS 17 runs on the iPhone XS (2018) or newer. The difference is JPEG XL is now part of the Apple's image pipeline for the camera in iPhone 16. Any 3rd party photo app developer can support JPEG XL if they wish.