[Reason077]

Considering JPEG XL and Ultra HDR are both based on JPEG, couldn't they be combined into one standard? Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the whole industry could eventually agree on a single standard?

Apple's HEIC is very annoying since it's not really supported by anything non-Apple. Would certainly be nice to see that go away.

[lifthrasiir]

It's crucial to distinguish JPEG the file format (now retronymed as JPEG 1) and JPEG the standardization group.

JPEG XL is officially blessed by JPEG but otherwise irrelvant here, even though non-progressive JPEG 1 files can be losslessly recompssed into JPEG XL by its design. The main role of JPEG here was to specify explicit goals for JPEG XL proposals [1]. Interestingly enough, the JPEG 1 recompression was not a part of that call for proposals back then. JPEG XL is otherwise a completely different format with much better compression algorithms, so should be the image format for pretty much all uses once popularized.

Ultra HDR [2] is an extension to the JPEG 1 format, which depends on XMP and the CIPA Multi-Picture Format. This kind of extension was not the first, even JPEG the group itself had a similar extension called JPEG XT which was never popular! (If you don't know much about JPEG, APNG was a similarly designed extension to PNG which eventually became a part of PNG.) Naturally Ultra HDR files cannot be smaller than ordinary JPEG 1 files, so can't fulfill Samsung's needs.

[1] https://jpeg.org/downloads/jpegxl/jpegxl-cfp.pdf

[2] https://developer.android.com/media/platform/hdr-image-forma...

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

I proposed lossless JPEG1 recompression as a functionality of JPEG XL after PIK/FUIF were chosen as a platform. The committee saw this of great value and we decided together this as an additional requirement after the competition was completed. We had a lot of experience of this in brunsli and were sure that we can deliver a good solution for it.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Ultra HDR is a relatively unambitious standard. JPEG XL already supports hdr, but also has a ton of other nice features (extra channels, bigger maximum resolution, high bit depth, better entropy coding).

[stephenr]

> Apple's HEIC is very annoying since it's not really supported by anything non-Apple.

"Apple's"?

HEIC is HEVC encoded image in a HEIF container, it's defined in ISO/IEC 23008-12, and was created by the Motion Picture Experts Group.

Further more, it's supported by Windows 10/11, Android 10 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Or did you mean, it's not really supported by browsers other than Safari?

Whose fault is that?

> Would certainly be nice to see that go away.

Why, exactly?

Did you also wish for H.264 playback support to "go away" when Safari supported it, but neither Chrome nor Firefox did?

[reedciccio]

> Whose fault is that?

Wild guess: the standard is encumbered by patents. MPEG-LA consortium is notorious for extracting rent from this sort of stuff.

[stephenr]

> On November 22, 2016, HEVC Advance announced a major initiative, revising their policy to allow software implementations of HEVC to be distributed directly to consumer mobile devices and personal computers royalty free, without requiring a patent license.

Regardless of that, macOS, Windows, iOS and Android all have OS-level support, via a combination of hardware and software decoders. Ubuntu (and Debian) provide libraries in their official repos.

So you're saying that neither Chrome nor Firefox support HEIC because of patents, despite arguably 90%+ of the environments they will run, having OS-level support for the format?

Sure that sounds likely. I'm totally sure that's the reason Google doesn't support this. I'm positive it's nothing at all to do with pushing the format they control, and omitting or removing support for formats they don't control. That would be such an obvious dick move, it's inconceivable they would do that.. right.. RIGHT?

[lonjil]

Mate, Apple has been using HEIC for over 6 years, but they didn't add it to Safari until less than a year ago. And Apple doesn't even want you to use HEIC on the web! They added it to Safari so that app devs can use it in WebViews.

[stephenr]

... So why does it need to "go away" then?

[lonjil]

You'll have to ask the person who wanted that.

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

I consider this would work best with a great local tone mapping algorithm and only sharing the HDR image (JPEG XL), then viewing it on SDR with a great local tone mapping algorithm. That would reduce the data size to transmit and give more guarantees that two people downloading the same file will see the same content.

[taspeotis]

https://xkcd.com/927/