[jjcm]

Always cool to see new visual compression libraries hit the scene. That said I think the hardest part isn't the math of it, but the adoption of it.

Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF. Since it's based on AV1, you'd get hardware acceleration for decoding/encoding once it starts becoming a standard, and browser support will be trivial to add once AV1 has wide support.

Compression wise AVIF is performing at about the same level as FLIF (15-25% better than webp, depending on the image), and is also royalty free. The leg it has upon FLIF is the Alliance for Open Media[1] is behind it, which is a consortium of companies including: "Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent."

I'm really excited for it and I hope it actually gets traction. It'd be lovely to have photos / screenshots / gifs all able to share a common format.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Open_Media

[BurningCycles]

>Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF

I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg XL format with a ~20% size decrease (courtesy of the PIK project).

It's slated for standardisation within a couple of weeks, it will be very interesting to see large-scale comparisons of this codec against the likes of AVIF and HEIF.

[marton78]

JPEG XL is a terrible name for something that claims to produce extra small results.

[jonsneyers]

It may not be the best name, but it sure is better than the names of the projects it was based on: PIK and FUIF. At least if you speak Dutch. A "pik" is a penis and a "fuif" is a party, so the combination would be the "penis party" image codec. I prefer "JPEG XL".

The etymology of the name "XL" is as follows: JPEG has called all its new standards since j2k something that starts with an X: XR, XT, XS (S for speed, since it is very fast and ultra-low-latency), and now XL. The L is supposed to mean Long term, since the goal is to make something that can replace the legacy JPEG and last as long as it did.

[stingraycharles]

There might be an explanation around it, but I find it not much better than Apple with their iPhone XS. I agree that XL is a bad name, and I don’t think that “pik fuif” would matter a lot (I’m also Dutch).

Could have been e.g. JPEG PF or JPEG LTS.

[l8rlump]

PIK project is also a terrible name for people who understand Danish.

[gardaani]

I hope that JPEG XL will be simpler than the competitors. If it's compression ratio is similar to AVIF and it can do HDR, then I'll all for it!

AVIF (and its image sequences) seems to be fairly complicated. Here's few comments [1] about it:

"Given all that I'm also beginning to understand why some folks want something simpler like webp2 :)"

"Despite authoring libavif (library, not the standard) and being a big fan of the AV1 codec, I do occasionally find HEIF/AVIF as a format to be a bit "it can do anything!", which is likely to lead to huge or fragmented/incomplete implementations."

Anyway, instead of adding FLIF, AVIF, BPG, and lots of similar image formats to web browsers, I think only one good format is enough and JPEG XR might be it. After something has been added to web browsers, it can't be removed.

Safari hasn't added support for WebP (which is good, there's no need for WebP after AVIF/JPEG XR is out) and it hasn't added support for HEIF (which is weird, considering Apple is using it on iOS), but maybe they know that there's no need to rush.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=960620...

[sk65535]

WebP version 2 is in the work at AOM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zogxpP2lm-o

It is complementary to AVIF (which targets photo capture more than delivery over the web).

WebP2 is like WebP: keep it simple, with only useful and efficient features, no fancy stuff. And aim at very low bitrate, it's the current trend, favoring image size over pristine quality.

Progressive rendering uses ~3x more resources on client side. So, instead, better have efficient 300-bytes thumbnails in the header.

[ksec]

>I think only one good format is enough and JPEG XR might be it.

I think you meant JPEG XL here? JPEG XR [1] is a completely different thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR

[jhabdas]

Browsers don't need the codecs anyway. They just need Wasm and a decoder. Clients can do the work[1] until the hardware supports the goods.

[1] https://git.habd.as/comfusion/fractal-forest/src/branch/mast...

[bscphil]

The example you linked to is pretty telling, because not only do the BPG images decode more slowly than natively supported images, the javascript decoding approach apparently breaks the browser's (Firefox's) color management. I think native support is needed for newer codecs to be viable for more than simple demos.

[spider-mario]

Chrome appears to interpret the canvas as sRGB and to convert from that, but that means that images decoded that way are effectively limited to sRGB until the canvas API allows specifying other colorspaces.

[bscphil]

In Firefox, these canvas images appear stretched into the full gamut of the monitor (oversaturated), even though I have a color profile and have full color management enabled in about:config.

[mceachen]

Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF?

(Speaking as someone who's seen several open, licensing-unencumbered image/video/audio formats fail to get traction with a majority of browsers).

[Scaevolus]

This presentation covers why AVIF isn't a great replacement for JPEG-- mostly that it's slow, complicated, and lacks a progressive mode.

https://www.slideshare.net/cloudinarymarketing/imagecon-2019...

[thaumasiotes]

Why would the lack of a progressive mode matter? How is a progressive mode better than a "loading..." spinner?

[TheRealPomax]

I'd by far rather see several full article-appropriately sized sideline image at only progression step 1 or 2 out of 5 or 6, than several empty boxes all showing spinners while the images load in.

Plus I'd love the ability to say "I'm on a low bandwidth, $$$ per megabyte network, stop loading any image after the first iteration until I indicate I want to see the full one" because you almost never need full-progression-loaded images. They just make things pretty. Having rudimentary images is often good enough to get the experience of the full article.

(whether that's news, or a tutorial, or even an educational resource. Load the text and images, and as someone who understands the text I'm reading, I can decide whether or not I need the rest of that image data after everything's already typeset and presentable, instead of having a DOM constantly reflow because it's loading in more and more images)

[jstummbillig]

Progressive mode is better than a loading spinner in the same way that PWAs are better than a loading spinner: By getting mostly usable content in as little time as possible to the user you decrease perceived wait, you decrease time to interactive and you increase perceived loading speed (even though time to full load might be the same or slightly increased).

[supportlocal4h]

Progressive photos always irritate me. The photo comes on my screen all blurry and out of focus and I'm disappointed that the moment I thought I had captured didn't turn out. Then, 3 seconds later, the picture changes and gets slightly better. Then I'm hopeful, but disappointed again. Then i think, "maybe it's not loaded yet", so i wait and hope. Then 2 seconds later it changes again. Is it done? Is it loaded now? Will it get better? Is my computer just dog slow? How long should I wait before I assume it's as good as it's going to get?

I know it's a small thing and doesn't really matter, but I don't like progressive photos.

Edit: This is just one context. There are plenty of other contexts where progressive is very useful.

[mrob]

In the common case that you don't actually care about the picture, you decrease actual wait, not just perceived. Progressive mode lets you ignore it before it's fully loaded.

[GoblinSlayer]

Did you confuse terminology? Web progressive is sort of an antonym to graphics progressive.

[thaumasiotes]

> By getting mostly usable content in as little time as possible to the user you decrease perceived wait

See, this is the issue. Progressive images aren't "mostly usable content"; they're vague, ugly blobs.

[nathan_long]

Imagine this: you set your browser to download only the first N bytes of each image, showing you a decent preview. If you want more detail on a particular image, you tap it, and the browser requests the next N bytes (or the rest of the file, if you prefer).

And to enable this, the site only needed to create one high-resolution image.

Seems like a victory for loading speeds, for low-bandwidth, and for content creation.

I think FLIF looks incredible.

[edflsafoiewq]

Agreed, but is it likely? Does any browser implement the even simpler feature "Show a placeholder for images. Tap the placeholder to load the actual image"?

[ChrisLomont]

Systems that render low res can download the prefix of the file and show an image, and stop there. Many modern image formats support this for precisely this reason. If you then want higher quality for some particular image, you can download more, not having to start over with a separate image file.

[est31]

The talk is by the FLIF author. One of the big marketing points for FLIF is its progressive mode. Of course every other codec will be criticized for not having one.

[nsomaru]

The theory goes that it’s better to show the user something resembling the final image than showing them a generic loading spinner.

[BurningCycles]

>Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF?

Well, it's not finalized as of yet (though it is imminent), so rate of adoption is just pure guesswork at this stage. However, things I deem necessary for a new image codec to become the next 'de facto' standard are:

royalty free

major improvements over the current de facto standards

Both AVIF and Jpeg XL tick these boxes, however Jpeg XL has another strong feature which is that it offers a lossless upgrade path for existing jpeg's with significantly improved compression as a bonus.

[rjvs]

So you're suggesting that the advantage JPEG XL has is that it will compress existing JPEGs better than FLIF or AVIF?

[BurningCycles]

Yes, it losslessly recompresses existing jpeg's into the jpeg XL format, while also making the files ~20% smaller, key point being lossless. Thus it is the 'perfect' upgrade path from jpeg which is the current lossy standard, as you will get better compression and no loss in quality when shifting to Jpeg XL.

This being a 'killer feature' of course relies on Jpeg XL being very competitive with AVIF in terms of lossy/lossless compression overall.

[setr]

I'm assuming this is bidirectional? You can go back from XL to jpeg losslessly as well? If thats the case, I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where you're not correct; it'd be an utterly painless upgrade path

[lukevp]

Sounds like it will just take an existing JPEG and reduce the size, but not re-compress it - so even though the original JPEG is lossy, there will be no additional loss introduced, whereas another format not based on JPEG would require a re-encode pass that would lose additional information.

[modeless]

Does it have the feature where the file can be truncated to any size to form its own thumbnail? That would be an incredibly useful feature in so many applications.

[Scaevolus]

It has a progressive mode, but not as aggressive of one as FLIF.

[ralusek]

Surely not any size. It'd have to be squares or something for that to make any sense, right?

[someguyorother]

Some wavelet formats (SPIHT and EZW e.g) have the property that truncating the lossless version at 10% of the size gives you the 10:1 lossy rendering of that picture. That property holds not just for 10% but for any fraction of the file.

It's not quite the same thing, but a very highly compressed high-res picture would probably look okay in thumbnail format.

[Dylan16807]

Some amount of data at the end of the file won't be usable, but it's easy to make a format that's resilient to you chopping anywhere.

[edflsafoiewq]

It sounds interesting, although my initial impression is that it sound like it will suffer from the same daunting complexity that afflicted JPEG 2000.

[janwas]

Good news: the reference software (http://gitlab.com/wg1/jpeg-xl) can decode about 50 Megapixels/s on a single Skylake core, with 3.1-3.7x speedup on 4 cores.

Encoding throughput is configurable from ~1 MP/s to about 50 per core. That's somewhat slower than JPEG, but can be faster with multiple cores.

[qwerty456127]

> It'd be lovely to have photos / screenshots / gifs all able to share a common format.

Given the way GIF is used nowadays the only reason it exists is it let's you put a video on the most of the places where you are only allowed to put pictures. For some weird reason many of such websites still won't let you upload an MP4 file despite they auto-convert the gifs you upload to MP4/AVC. From the technical point of view there hardly is a reason for GIF to be used at all.

[GoblinSlayer]

Spinners are nothing but energy drain anyway. If there's no progress, spinner won't stop.

[exikyut]

Objectively worse are infinite CSS-animations with opacity:0 set on them that Blink can't figure out are indeed invisible and don't need repainting at 60fps. Cue me noticing my CPU is at 100% and 69°C after about 2 minutes...

(ThinkPad T400s are really bad at thermal management.)

[thdrdt]

Exactly what you are saying: FLIF is not new (2015) but is still not adopted in any browser I know.

I also believe this was due to some license choices in the past.

But in this time of responsive websites it is a great format! Just download the amount of pixels you need to form a sharp image and then skip loading the rest.

I really hope this becomes mainstream one day.

[kalleboo]

What it will take for something to overthrow JPEG is for both Google and Apple to adopt it. If Android, Chrome, iOS, macOS and Safari all support it (and the phones shoot in it natively like the iPhone does with HEIF right now), it will take over.

[jhoechtl]

Think of it Google favoring sites with AVIF, JPEG XL, whatever they settle on in their page rank? Within half a year 80% of the web sites will have converted.

[dTal]

Worth noting that it's not really "new" as such, being over 4 years old. It still doesn't seem to have hugely caught on...

That said, lossless codecs have it easier because you can freely transcode between them as the mood takes you, with no generation loss, so there's less lock-in. For example, FLAC is dominant in audio, but there are a variety of other smaller lossless formats which still see use. Nobody much minds.

[rurban]

Because it was replaced by FUIF as a successor, then Google's PIK, then JPEG XL.

[amelius]

> Always cool to see new visual compression libraries hit the scene. That said I think the hardest part isn't the math of it, but the adoption of it.

The hardest part is figuring out which patents they infringe, and how to circumvent them.

[sarink]

Would this really be lovely? Isn't there some value in having 3 distinct formats (still picture, moving picture, moving picture with audio)? Each one is a subset of the next, but they are 3 different things that can easily be identified by what they (only potentially, but probably) are.

[cookiecaper]

It's a win from the implementation side because you can support all three use cases with one format, reducing code duplication and at least hypothetically leveraging the same improvements across the three use cases with no additional effort.

The UX concern you're describing doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with the implementation details themselves, as demonstrated by sites like imgur rebranding silent mp4/webms as "gifv". As long as the new format makes it reasonably easy to access data about its content (e.g., header field indicating animation/movement), there shouldn't be any issue with collapsing the use cases into a single implementation and simultaneously addressing the UX concern you mention.

[hrgiger]

For the curious netflix has shared AVIF format images http://download.opencontent.netflix.com/?prefix=AV1/Chimera/...

Here are some supporting implementations: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-avif/wiki#demuxers--play...

If you want to check how it looks like on supported browser: https://kagami.github.io/avif.js/

I was also digging around and as OP mentioned found it interesting topic.

[shotashota]

the article briefly mentions that its based on a decision tree. Does that it mean it doesn't parallelize well? Or does this fact not matter much?

[jonsneyers]

FLIF doesn't parallelize well, but that's not really because of the MA trees, but just because the whole bitstream is inherently sequential.

Modular mode in JPEG XL also has MA trees, but the bitstream is organized in a way that allows parallel decode (as well as efficient cropped decode).

[pmarreck]

Is this superior to HEIF and H.265 other than licensing being freer?

[spider-mario]

It’s faster (especially to encode), and in my opinion, better tuned for high quality. H.265 can give a “usable” image in a relatively small file size, but it sometimes takes a surprising amount of additional bytes to get rid of the somewhat oversmoothed aspect, and that additional amount can vary a lot from one image to the next, so with the current implementations, you have little choice but to verify visually. At least, that’s my experience with the reference encoder. I haven’t had a chance to experiment with Apple’s implementation.

In contrast, with JPEG XL, I can simply use the high quality setting once per image and be done with it, trusting that I will get a faithful image at a reasonable size.

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

This is an insightful comment.

[mehrdadn]

Is AVIF lossless like FLIF?

[Dylan16807]

It can be but it looks like it balloons a lot of files to do so.