this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner. We already have PNG and JPG and now we’ve got people using the annoying webP. Adding another format that requires new decoder support isn’t going to help.
You can't add new and better stuff while staying compatible with the old stuff. Especially not when your goal is compact files (or you'd just embed the old format).
All the cool kids use .HEIF anyway
I use jpeg 2000
Isn't that the same as other newer formats though?
There's always something new, and if the new thing is better, adding/switching to it is the better move.
Or am I missing something about the other formats like webp?
You have to offer something compelling for everyone. Just coming out with yet another new standard™ isn’t enough. As pointed out earlier, we already have:
What’s the point of adding another encoder/decoder to the table when PNG and JPEG are still “good enough”?
PNG and JPEG aren’t good enough, to be honest. If you run a content heavy site, you can see something like a 30-70% decrease in bandwidth usage by using WebP.
My understanding is that webp isn't actually all that bad from a technical perspective, it was just annoying because it started getting used widely on the web before all the various tools caught up and implemented support for it.
It's certainly not bad. It's just not quite as good.
"the annoying webp" AFAIK is the same problem as JPEG XL, apps just didn't implement it.
It is supported in browsers, which is good, but not in third party apps. AVIF or whatever is going to have the same problem.
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this like complaining that a PlayStation 2 can't play PS5 games?
It's a different culture between PCs can consoles. Consoles are standardized computers - they all have the same* hardware' Game developers can be confident in what functionality their games have access to, and so use the best they can.
PCs in comparison are wildly different from user to user due to being modular: you can pick from many parts to create a computer. As such, devs tend to focus on what most PC's can do and make them optionally better if the PC has access to supporting hardware (e.g. RTX ray-tracing cores).
Besides, video games are drastically complex in comparison to static images 😛
I just wish more software would support webp files. I remember Reddit converting every image to webp to save on space and bandwidth (smart, imo) but not allowing you to directly upload webp files in posts because it wasn't a supported file format.
If webp was just more standardized, I'd love to use it more. It would certainly save me a ton of storage space.
So… your solution is to stick with extremely dated and objectively bad file formats? You using Windows 95?
That's why all my files are in TGA.
What's wrong with PNG?
For what it is? Nothing.
Compared to something like JPEG XL? It is hands down worse in virtually all metrics.
I think this might sound like a weird thing to say, but technical superiority isn't enough to make a convincing argument for adoption. There are plenty of things that are undeniably superior but yet the case for adoption is weak, mostly because (but not solely because) it would be difficult to adopt.
As an example, the French Republican Calendar (and the reformed calendar with 13 months) are both evidently superior to the Gregorian Calendar in terms of regularity but there is no case to argue for their adoption when the Gregorian calendar works well enough.
Another example—metric time. Also proposed as part of the metric system around the same time as it was just gaining ground, 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour definitely makes more sense than 60, but it would be ridiculous to say that we should devote resources into switching to it.
Final example—arithmetic in a dozenal (base-twelve) system is undeniably better than in decimal, but it would definitely not be worth the hassle to switch.
For similar reasons, I don't find the case for JPEG XL compelling. Yes, it's better in every metric, but when the difference comes down to a measly one or two megabytes compared to PNG and WEBP, most people really just don't care enough. That isn't to say that I think it's worthless, and I do think there are valid use cases, but I doubt it will unseat PNG on the Internet.
I use arch btw
I’m not under the impression it would unseat PNG anytime soon, but “we have a current standard” isn’t a good argument against it. As images get higher and higher quality, it’s going to increase the total size of images. And we are going to hit a point where it matters.
This sounds so much like the misquoted “640K ought to be enough for anybody” that I honestly can’t take it seriously. There’s a reason new algorithms, formats and hardware are developed and released, because they improve upon the previous and generally improve things.
My argument is not "we have a current standard", it's "people don't give enough of a shit to change".
People don't need to give a shit, you just need websites and servers and applications to produce and convert images to the new format and the rest will happen "by itself'
It should be pretty much invisible to the users themselvea
And I suppose sysadmins and application developers are not people?
Why would you think that sysadmins and application devs wouldn't want to use JPEG XL?
I'm a developer and I like the format
You're thinking in terms of the individual user with a handful of files.
When you look at it from a server point of view with tens of terabytes of images, or as a data center, the picture is very different.
Shaving 5 or 10% off of files is a huge deal. And that's not even taking into account the huge leap in quality.
Only thing I can think of is that PNG is inherently lossless. Whereas JPEG XL can be lossless or lossy.
It has a higher bit depth at orders of magnitude less file size. Admittedly it has a smaller max dimension, though the max for PNG is (I believe) purely theoretical.
I haven’t dug into the test data or methodology myself but I read a discussion thread recently (on Reddit - /r/jpegxl/comments/l9ta2u/how_does_lossless_jpegxl_compared_to_png) - across a 200+ image test suite, the lossless compression of PNG generates files that are 162% the size of those losslessly compressed with JPEG XL.
However I also know that some tools have bad performance compressing PNG, and no certainty that those weren’t used
Until we circle back to “Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner.”
APNG, as an example, is backwards compatible with PNG.
If JPEG-XL rendered a tiny fallback JPEG (think quality 0 or even more compression) in browsers that don’t support JPEG-XL, then sites could use it without having to include a fallback option themselves.
Why are you using PNG when it’s not backwards compatible with gif? They don’t even render a small low quality gif when a browser which doesn’t support it tries to load it.
Are you seriously asking why a commonly supported 27 year old format doesn’t need a fallback, but a 2 year old format does?