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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.
It's worth noting the demo page is using JavaScript decoder to display the images; so it seems more than feasible to transition to the new format by first just having JavaScript decoder do the displaying on image-intensive sites. Still, I have to agree that especially with todays website-bloat and bandwidth "Another new format to pack your images even smaller!" isn't likely to fly. If the headline was much better quality, maybe, but it's not immediately clear to me that this is in any way better than just using higher quality/size JPEG. (Although as hinted, image-intensive sites who pay for their own bandwidth surely disagree!)
From Wikipedia
[24] http://www.mpegla.com/main/pro... (PDF)
Except that this test image has just a face and part of a shoulder, without any naughty bits. Not even erotic at all.
It's a good test image because it catches both distortions of detail and color damage to areas with a gentle gradient.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
From the web site "BPG natively supports 8 to 14 bits per channel," which is a huge advantage. 8 bits is more of a straight-jacket than people realise and this offers a more portable way for people to pass around high bit-depth issues than camera raw files (proprietary things inside) or TIFF (a complex container format prone to cross-platform issues and poor compression).
It really is political correctness gone off the deep end when anyone even *cares* that the standard Lena image is cropped from Playboy or that it depicts a female. Who cares! It's an image. The standard argument is that it's "sexualized" and thus offends the sensitivities of some feminists. I call bullshit.
First of all, nobody uses this because it's sexualized; much better free porn is widely available to anyone on the Internet anyways. People use it because it was once used historically for image comparison, and everyone since has used the same image so that their improvements to image compression algorithms can be directly compared to results published in older papers.
To even call it sexualized is borderline lunacy unless you're from an isolated religious cult or are living 200 years in the past. There's like, a whole bare shoulder in that photo. If that's going to offend you, you should really try to avoid ever going to a beach or walking down a public sidewalk, lest you run into so many bare ankles and shoulders that you might succumb to a panic attack.
Even if we were to accept that there's some sexualization indirectly through the context that it was cropped from Playboy (which none of the image comparison papers ever make a big deal of to begin with), why does a sexualized image offend, and why does it only offend when it's female? I'm a standard geeky male with a bit of a pot belly. Am I supposed to be enraged about body-image issues or offended at the world every time Calvin Klein interrupts my TV viewing by showing an ad with a hunky male model in boxers? Grow the fuck up, feminists.
I'm not sure how you can argue that after looking at the pictures in the link. It's clearly superior to JPG, because *everyone* can see the JPG artifacts. You only tend to notice the artifacts with BPG if you're comparing to a high quality picture or the original, or else looking really hard. It seems similar in principle to good audio compression that saves space by removing details the human ear is unlikely to miss.
It's too bad, because we really could have used this years ago while we were still on dialup - it would have saved us from seeing many beautiful images compressed all to hell. Yes, bandwidth matters to some degree nowadays, but not nearly as much as it used to. This format will, unfortunately, probably get little traction for one reason. JPG is here and it's "good enough". Audiophiles chafe at MP3 as well. Technically speaking, Ogg Vorbis was a superior format in nearly every way, but it's widely ignored in favor of MP3, which is "good enough". There's a small movement with FLAC and hi resolution sound, but most people can't hear or don't care about the difference. It will probably be the same for this.
Who knows... maybe I'll be proven wrong. It would help if the browser makers actually got behind it early and supported it fully - PNG suffered poor adoption because IE lagged so far behind with support for many years. Adobe, Corel, and other makers of image software will also need to offer native support as well. A format is worthless unless people are actually using it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I was hoping for the complete Lena. When the image popped up, in the 1970s, sure that the larger parts of the image were cut off for indecency.
But in 2014, I think this is no topic any longer.
A new coding algorithm could as well have come with a new perspective on morals.
And given us something NSFW, to look at in the workplace!
Look harder especially around areas of high detail. JPEG had problems with gradients, WebP doesn't, so in this example picture the difference between JPEG and any other format are quite severe which may have lead to you missing the obvious, such as the guywires holding up the crosses which are in some cases completely obliterated in the WebP format.
Otherwise the detail is similar however WebP introduces significant artefacts around the detail whereas BPG appears to draw it more smoothly.
I'm a videogame programmer, and Ogg Vorbis is actually a very popular format for game audio. It's not only license free, but it supports multichannel audio and seamless sample-accurate looping, which standard MP3 can't do. It was great for videogame companies, but did little to really promote the file format itself. So, sure, the fact that we have usable reference libraries means anyone can add support to their products, but I don't think that makes much of a difference, unfortunately.
Don't get me wrong - I think it's a great format (obviously technically superior) and would love to see it succeed. You say that if the format "becomes a standard implemented by browsers and major graphics tools, it will get adopted". Well, sure, but that's sort of the hard part, right?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
There is a reason why JPEG is blocky. The blocky nature of the encoding preserves details better.
BPG blurs everything heavily. Small details and fine textures literally disappear.(*)
JPEG is definitely outdated and web could gain from a worthy replacement. But BPG IMO doesn't appear to be "it".
(*) I wonder how JPEG would fare on the images, decoded from BPG. Since fine details are removed by BPG, the JPEG would be smaller too.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.