[userbinator]

It's great to see more people complete the "JPEG decoder challenge" --- and document it too. Have you read the official T.81 spec[1]? It is one of the easier standards to read, and it has flowcharts of all the algorithms which mean you can implement without really understanding the theory.

As you mentioned there are lots of other articles about writing JPEG decoders, as well as for the other popular image formats GIF and PNG. What I haven't seen much of if at all, however, are articles about video decoding; if you're interested to try another challenge, I recommend a decoder for H.261: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.261-199303-I/en

(I've written one --- in C --- and it is actually far simpler than JPEG in many ways, although it shares many similarities. A H.261 decoder in Python, with associated article, would definitely be very interesting to see, and AFAIK also a world-first!)

[1] https://www.w3.org/Graphics/JPEG/itu-t81.pdf

[yasoob]

Thanks for the H.261 decoder suggestion! I will actually seriously consider it because I am personally curious how video decoders work as well. I will make sure to document the process if I end up working on it.

[jart]

If you understand JPEG then you already understand the important bits of MPEG. It's also fun to study scaling and colorspaces. See https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/printimage.html and https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/printvideo.html

[deepaksurti]

And have more fun by doing the encoding/decoding on GPU [1]

[1] https://github.com/CESNET/GPUJPEG