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Bellard Creates New Image Format To Replace JPEG
An anonymous reader writes Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFMPEG, QEMU, JSLinux...) proposes a new image format that could replace JPEG : BPG. For the same quality, files are about half the size of their JPEG equivalents. He released libbpg (with source) as well as a JS decompressor, and set up a demo including the famous Lena image.
1/2 the size of jpg for equivalent quality. I'm sold.
As soon as Photoshop and Firefox/Chrome start supporting it I can see widespread adoption.
The below site offers a better comparison interface than the Lena image link from the post. Drag your mouse across the image to see the effect:
http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yol...
If you have the ability to change the server configuration, wouldn't CORS work? "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *"
JPEGs do support alpha channels, browsers just might not render them properly, but same goes with JPEGs with CMYK colorspace.
- Raynet --> .
Note that, according to the BPG web site, "An alpha channel is supported" so BPG has transparency.
How are we going to pronounce this thing? "Bee-Peg" I suppose since "Bee-Pee-Gee" doesn't roll off the tongue.
Looks good.
Boosting the signal, for those who don't read ACs:
CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) is explicitly intended to support things like CDNs. It lets you make cross-domain XHRs (and access the responses), so the JavaScript-based decoder will work perfectly. It adds minimal additional bandwidth requirement over a standard cross-domain GET (one short extra header on request, a couple on response), is supported on all mainstream browsers, and is much more secure that stupid hacks like JSON-P (though that would work here too, if for some reason you wanted to live in last decade's terrible work-arounds for same-origin policy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Yes and yes, respectively. Though for the latter they probably won't bother.
This is just a terrible idea.
JPEG2000 in Javascript
WebP in Javascript
Another WebP in Javascript
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
The problem here is that H.265 and by extension BPG are heavily patent-encumbered. These are not just latent patents but patents that the H.265 contributors are using for a revenue stream.
Bellard suggests "just use the licensed hardware decoder you probably already have" but a) that doesn't make technical sense in lots of cases and b) most people don't, in fact, have such a thing currently and c) the encoding situation is even worse.
There's more than one way to compress images though, some vastly different to others. BPM is working on the original image and compressing better than JPEG. As for whether that loses more data, that's not a given - it is possible for a different algorithm to compress to less data than JPEG but retain more information.
JPEG is (barring the possibility of some lossless mode that looks very little like JPEG except for a few metadata fields; but is technically part of the spec, not sure if we have one of those) indeed compressed; but it's lossy compression and lossy compression is an area where there is actually a reasonable amount of ongoing development.
This isn't to say that lossless compression is a trivial problem, or that there have been absolutely no improvements; but the 'by definition, it isn't lossless unless applying the decompression operation to the result of the compression operation produces something identical to the input' criterion makes it much easier to let the mathematicians and computer scientists work out the limits of the possible.
With lossy compression, there aren't any formal limits, which leaves the field much more open to solutions that rely on following the strong and weak points of human perception(visual in this case, auditory in other cases, visual/motion related in others), which leads to much greater complexity and diversity.
You don't have to wait for someone to pop out of the woodworks. BPG is nothing but a still frame of HEVC video which is patented up the ass. Bellard and other open source video authors are accustomed to ignoring the patent situation because they don't really have a choice if you want to be interoperable, but that isn't an excuse for creating patent problems in a field where there are already widespread royalty free standards (JPEG, PNG).