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Comment by benjaminl | Hacker News Reader

What has happened since those previous discussions is that HEIF is begining to get traction. Apple has adopted HEIF for it's latest OSes (iOS 11 or macOS High Sierra)[0] and Android P is adding support for it.

HEIF is a standards based based MPEG image format that like BPG is based on HEVC. Due to HEIF being an MPEG standard and the traction it is getting in the marketplace it looks like we might finally have a true next gen format to replace JPEG.

None of this takes away anything from BPG. I just thought is was curious that given HEIF is the obvious elephant in the room, the linked page didn't mention HEIF and indeed until now, no other comment has mentioned it.

[0] - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207022

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>Due to HEIF being an MPEG standard and the traction it is getting in the marketplace it looks like we might finally have a true next gen format to replace JPEG.

My opinion is that HEIF (using HEVC) is dead in the water as a widely used jpeg replacement, since there's pretty much zero chance of it being adopted on the internet due to it's patent/royalty situation.

I don't see sites (nor FOSS browsers like Firefox) agreeing to pay royalties to show/support images.

A more likely contender would be 'AVIF' based upon AV1:

https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/

But even this format which checks all the boxes will have a very hard time succeeding jpeg, as it is supported everywhere and simply 'good enough'.

Windows 10 added support for HEIF in 1803 as well.

Another one to keep an eye on in the near future is AVIF which is AV1 in a HEIF container as standardized by the AOMedia. With so many big players being behind AV1 it'll be interesting to see if it can gain user traction faster than HEIF.

…gain user traction faster than HEIF.

In less than one year from introduction, about a half billion iOS 11 users† are using it as their default photo format. Not bad for traction.

Of course it wasn't their decision, it just sort of happened.

␄

† I must confess I made up this number. >80% of iOS users are using iOS 11, last year there were 700M iPhones, there are some iPads too, and some Macs, though not all iOS hardware can do HEIF. Let's just say I'm probably within a factor two.

And every time my technically-challenged colleagues want to get photos from their iPhone onto a computer or web service, they can't do it, and don't know why their iPhone's camera is broken and why they feel so stupid with all of this technology.

Read the "Sharing this media" section of https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207022.

Conversion to JPEG for destinations that don’t support HEIF is automatic unless opted-out, like this screenshot I just took and uploaded from my iPhone:

https://i.imgur.com/SUeHuIO.jpg

The case in question is of a person who plugs his iPhone into a PC, where it appears like a camera (PTP mode?); they transfer as HEIF.

Apple could easily transcode back to JPEG on demand.

It does...

Does BPG support burst mode photos? If so does it use I/P/B frames for the other frames? This is an important consideration. Another consideration is if it can store audio - essentially every photo on iPhone is a short video with audio.

Hopefully the HEVC patent holders are reasonable and license under liberal terms - the market and opportunity is much much larger than just videos and HEIF has decent chance of killing jpeg.

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