The JPEG XL standard has now been formally approved | Hacker News Reader

The JPEG XL standard has now been formally approved

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46 pointsyboris17 comments

Both Firefox and Chrome support it behind a flag [1] with some limitation. I think Chrome doesn't support animation ( yet ). As usual, any media codec support on Safari requires an OS update. And I dont think Apple has shown any signs of interest ( or disinterest ) yet.

I hope we have more people testing out JPEG XL soon. Personally I am still undecided whether bit per pixel below 1.0 is important enough. Otherwise JPEG XL would have been a clear victory.

[1] https://caniuse.com/jpegxl

Chrome does support jxl animation.

In my opinion, it's not the compression density that is the main reason to upgrade to jxl, but the higher fidelity, including wide gamut and HDR.

I am thinking of website like 512kb.club. That is the trade off I am struggling to have a firm opinion. Because I want both higher quality and crazy fast web site.

Outside the context of Web, JPEG XL win hands down. To the point I think all HEIF on iPhone should convert to JPEG XL.

I think progressive decode is a great way to combine a fast loading experience with higher image quality. By the time you can look at the details, the full image is loaded, but the page will look ready very fast (since you can already show a reasonable preview with only 10% of the data transferred).

How does this compare to AVIF, based on the AV1 video codec? I.e., is this thing obsolete already?

[Edit: looks like the only important differences are that XL supports progressive rendering, and AVIF is way better at extreme compression settings.]

A good overview is here: https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_deth...

In my evaluation AVIF's tools occasionally create artefacts on the image even at relatively high quality (above that of mozjpeg). Most often this is blurring or banding occuring in the image.

Look at sky here for an example of the blurring: https://storage.googleapis.com/demos.webmproject.org/webp/cm...

This kind of blurring can occasionally happen on the face of a portrait, too.

An example of banding here:

https://storage.googleapis.com/demos.webmproject.org/webp/cm...

WebP, WebP2, and AVIF show banding in the sky, MOZJPEG to some extend, JXL and HEIF seem to be mostly free of banding.

My understanding is that if you want to avoid the occasional oversmoothing artefacts when using AVIF, you need to turn off many of the tools giving compression density. For example main smoothing tools have control fields that govern 64x64 pixels at once -- so you end up having either too little or too much smooting in some areas. In JXL the respective smoothing control field is 8x8, so you have much more opportunity to do the right thing.

I don't understand what "blurring" means applied to a sky. That would seem to require some detail to get blurred. Do you mean the skyline?

And, I do not see any banding, even at "tiny", in these images.

Original on left has noise/grain in the sky. In AVIF compression, this grain has been blurred away. JXL and HEIF keep the grain.

I can see banding in the AVIF image at all densities, including 'big' at 1.7 bpp. The banding is easier to see when brightness is increased, but is visible to me in normal viewing conditions. Perhaps your monitor is at dark settings or you have a plenty of light in your room. The bands are horizontal stripes in the Moscow image.

I see now...

I was on mobile. Probably all the images I saw were "original".

Is there a plan to have corresponding 1.0 release of reference implementation?

Latest 0.6.1 release was couple months ago…

Yes, we are working on it. The current git version is getting close. I think we may have a 1.0 release in about two months.

Is something coming out of patent? Is this patent protected?

JPEG XL has no patents on it - it's free to use by everyone.

JPEG XL is Patent-UNencumbered and Royalty free. Not patents free. Small but important difference.

Too late. We have PNG

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