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Comment by darkstalker | Hacker News Reader

What happened to JPEG 2000? It supports lossless too, but never seen it implemented on browsers.

Royalty and licensing issues. It's heavily encumbered with patents.

As far as the actual quality:compression goes (both lossy and lossless), it kicked ass. But with so many free options, why bother?

The image quality improvements with JPEG2000 were mathematical but not really perceptual, see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~jakulin/jpeg/artifacts.htm

Those photographic comparisons are pretty subjective and zoom in on muddy/blurred areas of the image for comparison - it would have been nice to see the entire photos. The non-photographic images clearly give JPEG2000 an edge, but he then compares it to PNG. Lossy compression isn't for compressing things like pictures of text, which this guy notes but makes the comparison anyway.

The output quality is also codec dependent, and the one used in those tests has been shown to be towards the back of the pack in a 2005 shoot-out[1].

There is also no comparison between lossless JPEG2000 and PNG on a photograph.

[1] http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/jpeg2000_codecs...

There was a Firefox extension that supported JPEG 2000, it worked great on the few photography-related websites that used the format.

It seems patents killed off the format for widespread acceptance. Maybe we'll actually get to use it in 2020 (when the patents will have expired).

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