Mozilla Doubles Down on JPEG Encoding with mozjpeg 2.0
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced the release of mozjpeg version 2.0. The JPEG encoder is now capable of reducing the size of both baseline and progressive JPEGs by 5 percent on average (compared to those produced by the standard JPEG library libjpeg-turbo upon which mozjpeg is based). Mozilla today also revealed that Facebook is testing mozjpeg 2.0 to see whether it can be used to improve the compression of images on Facebook.com. The company has even donated $60,000 to contribute to the ongoing development of the technology.
Sorry, it is hard to get excited about marginal improvements in still raster image compression. Yes, rasters are really important and everything, but at the same point images themselves are so absurdly small already compared to the likes of video technologies, and video is the vast majority of the internet. Seems like a better use of their time to focus on making HEVC or VP9 more capable.
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The comments thus far have been compacted...
and still no merge of the working WebP patch that was proposed four years ago because NIH.
1982 called, it want's its bandwidth back.
having your boyscout troop sponsored by a meth dealer.
A decade ago, nerds sometimes posited that in the future, connectivity will be so fast, RAM/storage space so large, and processors so powerful that the world might just switch to lossless formats. Here we are in 2014 still trying to trim a couple of percentage points off JPEG file sizes, and web designers still advise keeping images under 100k each or so.
The jpg's are now encoded 180degrees rotated.
"The only regret we have is that we could not also rotate the controls of all the image viewing software out there, that would have made this improvement even more awesome. But please be assured that it is on our to-do list for version 34 (release expected in September or October)" said Josh Aas.
Lossless formats still have a pixel density. For the same size of file, a compressed image will have a higher apparent resolution than an uncompressed one. So even with near-unlimited bandwidth, there are STILL arguments you can make in favor of compression being part of the standard.
e.g. 1MB of space used to encode a JPEG vs the same space used to encode a .png. The JPEG would have a higher effective resolution.
G+ is making FF crash its ass off these days. It would be a fun paranoid speculation to imagine that Google knows of bugs in FF which can be triggered with mundane code to make my browser asplode, but even if it were true it would be irrelevant because mundane code shouldn't blow up Firefox.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Take all landscape photos and crop 33% of the space on the left side and 33% on the right side. I see they already do this to widescreen videos taken on smart phones.
I just saved 66% of their bandwidth, and made the images more appealing to hipsters and guidos!
Google has deliberately killed more technologies than Microsoft ever just let wither and die, and Mozilla has been burned by this more than once. At this point, I'd say it's quite reasonable to demand that Google provide some assurances that it's not going to flake out this time.
What ELSE does it do? is it encrypting your metadata into it so you can never detatch yourself from it?
AMD recently presented HSA-enabled jpeg decoding. That would also be an interesting addition. Make these shaders work a little...
http://developer.amd.com/resou...
Here is how their new compression method works. It reduces all images down to a single one or zero. If the bit read in is one, it display a picture of a cat. If it is zero, it displays a picture of Peter Griffin farting. And as a bonus, if no bit can be read, it displays the goatsex guy.
Why indeed would Mozilla waste their resources on this when stability and security on web clients ought to be their greater concern?
If it were up to me, I would start with self-contained date formats like JPEG that browsers handle frequently, and put that code through a formal verification process. Eventually, maybe even HTML rendering and the browser could be subject to formal verification. This could strengthen computer security dramatically.
If Facebook really wanted to help reduce global bandwidth and was willing to play hardball, they would just switch their images to webP suddenly, and display a message to update your browser if you cant see them. Microsoft would have to fold if suddenly their browser didn't show images. Not sure if FB is large enough to survive the backlash, but if they are we could see new codecs in IE within the month.
Microsoft would have to fold if suddenly their browser didn't show images.
With Apple holding a monopoly on web browser engines on 36 percent of tablets, it arguably has room to play hardball with Facebook.
Any "nerd" who posited that bandwidth and storage concerns would be so totally irrelevant that we'd happily waste 10-20x as much of them for practically zero benefit was not so much a "nerd" as a total idiot. Having more bandwidth means you want to do more with it, not waste it for no reason.
Real "nerds" worth the cred understand that not only does lossy compression provide great results at small fractions of the sizes of the best lossless representations, but research into lossy compression also helps us understand the structure of real-world information, intelligence, and human perception in new ways.
A future where we have lossy formats which achieve results equal to today's formats in a quarter the bandwidth because we've come to better understand the structure present in real-world signals and the ways humans perceive and interpret information is a cooler and more exciting future than one in which we [url=http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/19/the-hidden-expense-of-energy-costs-print-is-costly-online-isnt-free/]waste exajoules of energy and help destroy the planet[/url] by sending each other millions of terabyte-sized high resolution lossless cat videos.
that'd be this link
that'll teach me to use preview esp. when I've been spending too much time on sites where the article discussions use bbcode
What we really need is a new container format that combines the image data of a JPEG with the 8-bit transparency layer of a PNG image.
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As long as the renderers support it, and it doesn't come saddled with unFRANDly baggage, it will probably do fine.
However, Mozilla has a questionable track record, when it comes to support for standard media.
As a Web developer, it rankles me to have to store double the size of the video on my server, just so that stubborn developers can have their way.
False equivalence. Facebook could use that $60k to fund/bribe inclusion of WebP, or maintain their own build of AssWeasel or whatever fork they want to call it.
Or they could entice users with "if you want to see pictures, click here". That works really well, and the facebook using billions might convert to something other than firefox.
Or, they could be supportive of this new tech and not use their massive market share to clobber open source into submission.
On the other side of the argument, NIH is a terrible summary of this link, found on the page you linked to.
http://muizelaar.blogspot.com/...
WebP seems like it has grown a lot - which means keeping up with another imaging library and testing something that is continually changing. Given the limitations mentioned, it hardly seemed worth the effort. And problems with the new patch abound - no tests, breaking Windows build, and devolution into a discussion forum.
Take the opinion that you don't care either way, and read through that bug with an open mind. It's hoseshit, top to bottom, and I don't blame anyone one bit for keeping WebP out.
So what is its Weissman Score? if it's less than 5, forget about it, Pied Piper has done it before.
JPEGmini is a proprietary implementation of the same concept : fully compatible implementation of a JPEG compressor that does better than libjpeg at the cost of much higher CPU use.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I'm not convinced webP is better, I've done a quick comparison and to my eyes JPEG beats it on like for like file sizes:
40k jpeg vs 40k webP (images converted to png for your viewing convenience)
Compared to the lossless original (one of Google's own webP comparison images) the webP version has lost more chroma resolution, leading to desaturation in parts and blurring of strong colour details like the red arm band.
It would be nice as a replacement for PNGs with alpha channels though.
As long as JPEG is 8-bit and not 14-bit like RAW is, it will be useless. Anthony David Photography Greece