FFmpeg Lands JPEG-XL Support
Merged into FFmpeg on Saturday was support for the JPEG-XL image codec. FFmpeg is making use of the de facto libjxl library for handling JPEG-XL content and supports both image encoding and decoding. This work includes muxing/demuxing of JPEG-XL images as streams and other FFmpeg support work around this codec.
JPEG-XL is what hopes to be the universal replacement for other raster lossy and lossless image formats. The JPEG-XL bitstream was finalized at the end of 2021 and has begun seeing adoption by various open-source and closed-source applications. JPEG-XL is aimed to be royalty-free though earlier this year some concerns were raised with Microsoft being granted a patent around "rANS" (range Asymmetric Numeral System) data compression that is used by JPEG-XL.
We'll see how the long-term adoption of JPEG-XL plays out but in any case as of yesterday the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library now has support for the image format.
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