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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

JPEG XL

The JPEG XL Image Coding System (ISO/IEC 18181) has produced an open source reference implementation available on the JPEG XL Gitlab repository. The software is available under Apache 2, which includes a royalty-free patent grant. Speed tests indicate the multithreaded encoder and decoder outperforms libjpeg-turbo. Independent subjective and objective evaluation experiments have indicated competitive performance with commonly used image coding solutions while offering new functionalities such as lossless transcoding from legacy JPEG format to JPEG XL. The standardization process has reached the Draft International Standard stage.

That to me is the biggest news. I remember reading a presentation where it had even better quality at medium bitrate than AVIF. Since JPEG does not belong to Google or Apple, hopefully it would be a format easier to swallow from both parties.

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Repo in question: https://gitlab.com/wg1/jpeg-xl

FWIW, AVIF is a project of the Alliance for Open Media, which all the major browser vendors are founding members.[0] AVIF should get browser support soon.

[0] https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

Half the technology in JPEG XL is from Google but hopefully people won't get petty about that.

A bigger problem is that various companies just did a lot of work to adopt HEIF so they're not going to be eager to churn onto JPEG XL. Generally people wait 5-10 years before they're open to upgrading.

Also got this ANS coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems

>Half the technology in JPEG XL is from Google

Yes but it is submitted as an open standard to an Organisation that doesn't run or belong to Google.

Is HEIF used anywhere other than on Apple devices?

Canon, Android.

Windows 10 has support as well.

Both Android and Windows does not support HEIF by default.

HEIF has a few problems though that make it not very suitable to replace JPEG as the default image format:

- Patent situation. If you're a camera or phone maker, it is quite a risk to use HEIF. Even if you pay all the major patent pools, you only cover part of the patent claims. You'll need dedicated hardware, so once you've produced the devices, the patent trolls have quite some power since you can't just switch to another codec with a software update.

- The codec is not optimized for high-quality still images – it's a video codec, and has its sweet spot in the lower bitrate regions. Photographers care about subtle texture, high bit depth, etc.

- There's no progressive decoding – again, it's a video codec, where progressive decode of a single frame is not useful, but for still images on the web, progressive can be a desirable option.

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