I love image and video compression. For fun, I made my own and managed to squeeze an image of myself into byte level file sizes.

It's amazing to me how we much we can fill in the blanks to make something recognizable with such little data.

Most comprehensive write up of JPEG et al. I have ever come across.

I think the MozJPEG compression optimisations deserves a mention, as does where we started, with RLE encoding for printer things.

Also important for my personal understanding of JPEG is the context: slow CPUs and analogue screens. OG JPEG was optimised for this, MozJPEG changed the look up tables and the ubiquitous 'turbo' JPEG library to use a few more CPU cycles and save a few more bytes, whilst fixing the banding that was actually okay in the analogue days of old CRT monitors.

Bookmarked the article for re-reading.