FFmpeg Lands JPEG-XL Support

[coder]

This is plain wrong. you can losslessly compress jpegs to varying degrees, sometimes 5%, sometimes 50%, cjxl is open source, you can test it directly, or build ffmpeg if you wish to try it. I have a 23M jpeg compressed losslessly to 15M without even using a too slow preset. I would consider that "huge savings" to me.

Thanks for the datapoint. Would you tell us more about it? Is it huge in resolution? Does it have large areas with relatively little variation? What was the base JPEG quality level?

some more real nice goodies like progressive rendering.

FWIW, JPEG and PNG can both do progressive.

[Quackdoc]

I used cjxl (and djxl for returning to jpg), both are part of https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/libjxl/ - no special parameters required.

The tool uses the lossless conversion by default if possible. That is a little bit odd as you can't enforce "do lossless or exit", but it works so far.

what do you mean do lossless if possible or exit? it can always do lossless, though sometimes the resulting file can be larger then the source (converting from PNG is a common example). I just convert my entire library then use a script to compare file sizes, then delete the larger one

[Joe2021]

What was the exact tool/command line that you used?

I used cjxl (and djxl for returning to jpg), both are part of https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/libjxl/ - no special parameters required.

The tool uses the lossless conversion by default if possible. That is a little bit odd as you can't enforce "do lossless or exit", but it works so far.

[cl333r]

it's more of a classification thing. where webms should be reserved for content that should be treated as "videos" and avif should be treated as "pictures/animations". the worst part is, firefox will play animated avifs as videos if you rename .avif to .mp4... so it's entirely a choice thing

I thought there's some technical reason, like maybe the file gets much larger or something. I always hated animated gifs because they loop indefinitely (which is annoying) whereas with a video file I can click pause or something. Yeah you could find a setting in browser settings for that but it was much easier for me to just close the tab because animated gifs are often used as avatars or other silly annoying spam.

[Quackdoc]

I agree that avif animations are better than gif (duh), but why not use a webm file instead?

it's more of a classification thing. where webms should be reserved for content that should be treated as "videos" and avif should be treated as "pictures/animations". the worst part is, firefox will play animated avifs as videos if you rename .avif to .mp4... so it's entirely a choice thing

[cl333r]

I've already started sharing avif animations, and my response to anyone who sees a broken one on the internet is the same. pester your browser to support it or move to a better browser.

I agree that avif animations are better than gif (duh), but why not use a webm file instead?

[Quackdoc]

I stay with Firefox mostly because of habit, and partially because there are only 3 browser engines left that websites may support actively. I don't want a monopoly of Chrome.

I was the same. but if the argument is that we don't want chrome dictating the future of the web, when firefox actively chooses not to implement something, for instance kickstarter had to override a change from their CDN to use gifs instead of avifs since it broke firefox compat. sure, firefox has the potential to keep other browsers in check, but I don't want to see a future where we prevent migrating to better technologies because a browser refuses to implement something.

I've already started sharing avif animations, and my response to anyone who sees a broken one on the internet is the same. pester your browser to support it or move to a better browser.

[billyswong]

I'm mostly migrated away from firefox because of stuff like this. chrome has animated avif support just fine. people can complain that it's just a video format all they want from a technical standpoint. but completely dismiss the people that actually use the files. having a full file distinction is very nice.

I stay with Firefox mostly because of habit, and partially because there are only 3 browser engines left that websites may support actively. I don't want a monopoly of Chrome.

[Quackdoc]

That's cool but I wonder is any software actually creating or would like to create this large images? The Hubble telescope probably creates a sequence of images and then when viewing they're glued with software for dynamic interaction (scrolling, zooming) to save RAM and whatnot. I imagine 99.9999% of programmers would agree that you shouldn't store a 1Bx1B image as that would trash your resources even on a supercomputer unless you have a really good reason not to use a tiled image. And what reason/scenario would that be to have a 1Bx1B image? (I'm not arguing just trying to figure out a legit use case).

who knows, not me for sure. but the potential is there. 5 years from now, 10 years. how old is jpeg now, 20 years old? I think this is a smart "future proofing" step.

What was the exact tool/command line that you used?

I have achieved similar results with libjxl, cjxl and djxl -d 0 -e 7

Now the question is, when will Firefox support it outside nightly. They implement AVIF fast but only the static image part, which is quite pointless as AVIF's strength is in replacing animated GIF. Then they waste time arguing whether JPEG-XL is worth implementing and stuck there.

I'm mostly migrated away from firefox because of stuff like this. chrome has animated avif support just fine. people can complain that it's just a video format all they want from a technical standpoint. but completely dismiss the people that actually use the files. having a full file distinction is very nice.

[formruga]

Shouldn’t touch this until we know the patent situation.

The patent story is hard to believe. The most important fact is that Jaroslaw Duda - "the author of the novel ANS algorithm and its variants tANS and rANS specifically intended his work to be available freely in the public domain, for altruistic reasons. He has not sought to profit from them and took steps to ensure they would not become a "legal minefield", or restricted by, or profited from by others." (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymme...nt_controversy). In 2015 (?) - 2018 Google wanted to patent the method, but failed. In 2019 -2020 Microsoft tried to patent the algorithm, but also failed. But second round 2021 - 2022 succeeded! I don't understand how it is possible, especially when the author, professor Duda, emailed to The Register: ""I don't know what to do with it – [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm". The author opinion maybe is biased, but I trust Mr. Duda.