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by netol 1159 days ago
"Google's deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally."

I thought AVIF was royalty-free.
2 comments
Jasper_ 1159 days ago
The specification of AVIF is also publicly available, while you would have to pay a little under $500 to purchase all five of the ISO/IEC 18181 specifications for JPEG-XL. Not a monumental cost, but something prohibitive for a hobbyist:

https://www.iso.org/standard/77977.html?browse=tc https://www.iso.org/standard/81554.html?browse=tc https://www.iso.org/standard/80617.html?browse=tc https://www.iso.org/standard/80618.html?browse=tc https://www.iso.org/standard/80619.html?browse=tc

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zorgmonkey 1158 days ago
The C++ committee makes draft versions of the standard available for free[0], I've heard that often the last draft before a new standard version is published is almost identical to the published version. It would be awesome if someone involved with JPEG-XL could arrange for the same. Edit: I found https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03565 but it hasn't been updated since 2019.

[0] https://eel.is/c++draft/

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ZeroGravitas 1158 days ago
Patented and royalty-free are not distict, it depends on whether the owners of the patent have agreed to others using it royalty-free, which is the case here (for both AVIF and JPEG-XL, and both have Google owned patents I think) .

So they are technically correct but a little misleading.

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