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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.
This will go over about as well.
Because the new half-the-size JPEG files wouldn't work with old JPEG editors/viewers.
And how does it compare ti JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR? And all the other JPEG alternatives that have been trumpeted but never taken hold? And why should this succeed when those have failed?
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...
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!)
Why can't they just fix the damn JPEG and make it half the size instead??
It would not be compatible with existing software. Furthermore, poor compression is only one problem with JPEG. Another is the lack or transparency. JPEGs are always 100% opaque.
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.
Bandwidth still matters for mobile, so smaller images of the same quality are quite welcome on mobile sites and apps.
Given that the developing world is likely to get online via wireless solutions, bandwidth is going to matter for a lot of people for a long time to come.
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...
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).
JPEGs do support alpha channels, browsers just might not render them properly, but same goes with JPEGs with CMYK colorspace.
- Raynet --> .
I can see how explaining a file format would be a problem for you.
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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.
Because it has never been done before? http://bstring.sourceforge.net...
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.
Barney Stinson settled the pronunciation many years ago on How I Met Your Mother: it's "bee-peg". Although this format probably won't be used exclusively for pictures of boobs.
I have to agree, even as a big fan of smaller. BPG arguably does create better images at small sizes but it's not much better than JPEG. It trades JPEG's pixelation for removal of details/changing colours/etc.
The main issue that is going to hold back adoption is the use of HEVC/H.265 as compression codec. While dedicated hardware is not needed to decompress the images in a timely manner, it also means that no licensing fees have been paid to the MPEG LA. Since the format is patent encumbered, I can't see this taking off unless the patent pool decides to give out a royalty free license for still images. Bellard himself assumes that most hardware will come with said codec licensed and built in but that does not include old hardware or even current hardware that is not being shipped with it. Barely anything ships with H.265 support other than the iPhone 6 and a couple of Mediatek SoCs.
I want this, but have a few random thoughts on this.
It appears that the Javascript decoder is emscripten based - this means it can still be optimized. BPG library works but I'd rather see native browser support for this, as it will make more efficient use of the processor (for slower systems or a poor raspberry pi, this matters).
TL;DR - I want this in my camera. I want support in my favourite image editor. I want native browser support. Once the whole chain is catered for, this has a chance.
So what constitutes a "product" when it comes to software? Say Mozilla implement this new format for Firefox, does that mean Mozilla have to pay $0.20 to MPEG LA every time someone downloads a copy of Firefox?
The demo website linked in the story sent a BPG decoder implemented Javascript to our browsers. So does that mean Bellard owe MPEG LA a metric shit-ton of money now?
It's a good test image because it catches both distortions of detail and color damage to areas with a gentle gradient.
There must be better ones. It's washed out with hardly any green or blue.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I know it's a good image for this purpose, it's just the origin that is really sexist. I don't mind, but I can understand how some of our female colleagues would find it inappropriate - ranging from immature to degrading, depending on where in their cycle they are right now...
I don't think we should compare BPG with JPEG, since it is very outdated. I wonder how it stacks against WebP - does it also support animation? Better compression? Licenses? Faster encoding/decoding? Browser manufacturer support? I'm all for making web more optimal, because you can never have "fast-enough" bandwidth, especially on a mobile device in bad connection area, but lets compare similar things.
Doing some investigation, the claim that the BPG decoder is "small" might not be exactly true. The decoder, even minified, clocks in at 237 kB.
Although this is mitigated since the decoder could be cached in the browser cache, making it so that the decoder could be downloaded just once - at least just once per session. And once per web site, of course, because everyone is going to host their own copy of it. (I imagine at least... would same-origin policy be a problem if you tried to keep it somewhere central/standard?)
Anyone deploying this would be advised to consider if the space savings outweigh that initial cost in space. Then again, it all depends on what you want to acheive. What if you just have a huge archive of seldom-accessed images and want to save on disk space rather than on network bandwidth? Might make sense to store the images as BPG server-side and do decompression server-side if you can take the CPU hit.
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.
I agree, half the size is for most people irrelevant. The article mentions the quality improvement you wanted but did not make it in the summery. Upto 14bits per channel could be a major plus when implemented natively in a DLSR.
Even then it first need to be widely supported before it is used by many, it needs to be used by many before it will be widely supported.
Well, not exclusively. Not quite.
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If they have to be told what the image is from to get upset, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, they're getting offended wrong. The image as it is now does not objectify women any more than images that run in modern newspapers. Once it's been cropped to this level, it's literally lost all value that made it sexist to start with. If you can tell them instead it's from some old ladies fashion magazine and they're suddenly okay with it, I'd have to say you proved my point.
Yes and yes, respectively. Though for the latter they probably won't bother.
This is just a terrible idea.
Not so much a "limit" as much as a complete showstopper.
Oh man, you didn't get the joke... :(
I was pleased to see that Matplotlib switch to Grace Hopper as their test image. http://matplotlib.org/examples...
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!
...because jpegs are so huge to begin with :|
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Forgive my ignorance, but how is this image sexist and/or how is it's source (Playboy?) sexist?
In order for something to be sexist doesn't it in some way have to discriminate between sexes?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Note that, according to the BPG web site, "An alpha channel is supported" so BPG has transparency.
Now, that should have been the headline instead of saving a few poxy KB.
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Here is a less cropped version of Lena (prepare to be offended!)
http://jquery-custom-scrollbar...
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.
Were it a headline, it wouldn't distinguish it from WebP which got alpha channel in 2012, and is lossy format.
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.
In a crowded place, bandwidth is very much an issue - as radio is a shared medium.
But generally speaking, bandwidth matters more for the mobile operators than it matters for you. They are the ones who have to do expensive upgrades when they face network congestion.
There's ample path to adoption. If it becomes a standard, browsers will implement it and major graphics tools will support its creation. Wherein major content providers who still have large bandwidth bills will use it to reduce their bandwidth requirements. The wider the adoption, the more the usage. We've seen new video formats effectively obliterate older, ubiquitous formats a number of times. We're overdue for the equivalent with still images. There's also the issue that it offers developers a number of nice additional features, like efficient lossless compression modes, transparency and HDR. That's huge - it's not just competing with JPG, it's also competing with *PNG*, and it's *way* smaller than PNG.
There's also specialty apps. Think, for example, something like Google Earth which is constantly downloading vast amounts of texture data. Waiting for that data (as well as the height data) is why you have to wait for Google Earth when you move to a new location. The more high-detail texturemapped objects (like buildings) that get added, the more important good compression is going to be.
There's tons of other reasons, but the basic point is, if it truly is "generally agreed as significantly better", and becomes a standard implemented by browsers and major graphics tools, it will get adopted. Maybe not instantly, but it definitely will happen.
"We consider that six courts and an asylum claim are a rather odd way of returning to Sweden within a month."
If the bar it's competing against for "widely supported" is raw camera image formats, then that's a pretty low bar to meet. Don't forget that it also has transparency, so it's also competing with (and crushing) PNG, as well as effective lossless compression.
I can really envision this taking off, if it gets adopted as a standard and browsers give it that starting "push". If browsers support it, photoshop and other major tools will as well, and content providers who pay out the nose for bandwidth absolutely will use it. There's even a "legacy mode" javascript decoder for good measure for people who don't have support.
"We consider that six courts and an asylum claim are a rather odd way of returning to Sweden within a month."
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.
Sometimes you can 'fix' a format (maybe I'm just dating myself; but MP3s made impressive strides in apparent quality at a given bitrate in the years after their introduction); but you run into a major constraint:
If a spec-compliant; but not otherwise updated, decoder chokes on your 'improvement', you don't really have an improvement, you have a new format derived from the old format. If there is room to improve the encoder, while still producing something that existing decoders consider valid, great, adoption will likely be easy; but if decoder behavior prevents you from doing what you want to make some improvement or other, sometimes you just need a new format.
>> it still flies to use a Playboy centerfold cropout as a standard test image in serious work :) :)
It encodes Beauty. It has to, An image format for the web must be able to handle nudity
>>And yes, the new format looks great. :)
Yep, the picture looks great
aaaaaaa
With 'mobile' there are really two considerations: One is the fact that 'mobile' (even if the fault is, in fact, with shitty backhaul) is going to be fairly slow in emerging markets. Two, relevant even in wealthy developed nations without asshole oligopoly telcos, is the fact that mobile devices are brutally power constrained, and RF chatter isn't exactly cheap in energy terms. The faster you get the data you need and shut down, or move to a slower, lower power mode, the radios, the happier your battery will be.
With mains power it matters less (electricity isn't free; but a few extra dollars a month is far less annoying than having your battery keel over dead at a bad time); but barring exciting breakthroughs in battery chemistry or design, basically all the savings are going to have to come from the device side.
"There's like, a whole bare shoulder in that photo. If that's going to offend you"
You have some weird conceptions, as though the reason people have a problem with the choice is because they're offended by the image of skin. A lot of the same voices opposing the use of images that objectify women are supporters of, for example, stopping the banning of images of breastfeeding and the like. It's not nakedness that's the problem. It's making half of the human race into objects seen as worth nothing more than sexual fantasies that's the problem.
I live in Iceland where commercial sexual objectification is illegal - for example, strip clubs and the like (of course, we're also notorious for poor enforcement of our laws, but that's neither here nor there). So do you think we're some sort of puritanical country? Before you answer, I should probably mention that our last prime minister was a lesbian (a fact that went almost unmentioned in the leadup to the elections, nobody gave a rat's arse), Gay Pride is one of our biggest annual festivals (attended by nearly a third of the country), 60% of children our born out of wedlock, 80-90% of first children are born out of wedlock, we have one of the youngest average ages for commencement of sexual activity in Europe, one of the highest average number of sexual partners in Europe, and where the concept of "dating" without sleeping with someone is pretty much an alien concept. Sweden also has similar laws - are they famously puritanical, the Swedes?
(Not to mention that you see your friends and neighbors naked when you go to the pool here... trust me, people here aren't offended by the sight of skin!)
"We consider that six courts and an asylum claim are a rather odd way of returning to Sweden within a month."
Why is there no mention of Portable Network Graphics in this discussion? .png has an alpha channel, has broad support, and uses *lossless* compression. What's not to like? It does not compress as tightly as highly compressed .jpg, but as several have pointed out, that's not as big an issue any more.
So am I missing something? Or is it just some kind of marketing thing that .png does not see much use?
Will
My main problem with the name is that every time I see "BPG" I just mentally autocorrect it to "BGP" and then end up somewhat confused.
You and your friends who can get decent bandwidth, can afford decent smartphones and who can afford to just throw down an additional 2 euro a month for said bandwidth are, you may be surprised to hear, not representative of everyone. For example, the average internet connection speed in Algeria is about 0.94Mb/s. I'm pretty sure most people there are also not wandering around with the latest LTE enabled phone either.
Don't think of it as "low end" graphics. The smallest pictures are demonstrating the worst artifacting possible in order to demonstrate the compression techniques being used. In the case of JPG, we can see the block-based artifacts very clearly. In PNG's case, you can see that the compression works differently, by reducing details and colors where it can, creating a "photoshopped" effect, as you put it.
Just like you never really see a JPG image compressed that badly, you'll probably also never see a BNG graphic with highly visible artifacts like that. The important point to take from this is that for the same image quality, you'll get images that look far less compressed. Alternatively, for the SAME bandwidth, you can get images that have much less visible artifacts. This format also supports high bit depths as well as transparency, so it's very much at home in the high-end side of graphics as well.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
24bit PNGs compress much worse. It really is an issue for the web, images form the majority of the payload for most websites, and whilst people on /. might be use to several Mb/s broadband the reality is many people don't have that. Even in the UK mobile speeds are very low outside of cities. And when you compare evena jpg at fairly high quality to a 24bit PNG there's no practical difference visually so there's just no reason to clog up the web with PNGs. Obviously I'm just referring to photos - PNGs are great for logos/icons/etc.
I'd still rather Lytro support.
PNG is used extensively in Apple products. It's the standard format for non-compressed images in iOS apps, along with jpg for compressed images. Apple recommends using png for user interface elements, and jpg for pictures. Which makes sense, since jpg can compress a picture to 20% of the size with very few artifacts. Size does matter for mobile apps. And I wish people would realize that it matters for servers, too. Yes, available bandwidth is enormous these days. But if your server is serving pages that are twice the size and your audience is large, you're going to need a bigger server room and use considerably more energy. Servers are on their way to becoming the biggest power hogs on the planet. Smaller images mean less hard disks and less data pipes.
If you're running a server for a big company (say, Google or FaceBook) and every image is only half as big, that means a huge reduction in the number of servers you need, power consumption, etc. Less congestion on the internet, more responsive servers, less wasted energy, etc...
I imagine you also have a car that guzzles up twice as much gas as other cars, but who cares since you can afford it?
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.
Why is there no mention of Portable Network Graphics in this discussion? .png has an alpha channel, has broad support, and uses *lossless* compression. What's not to like? It does not compress as tightly as highly compressed .jpg, but as several have pointed out, that's not as big an issue any more.
So am I missing something? Or is it just some kind of marketing thing that .png does not see much use?
Generally I use png when I need transparency on logos and the like, for everything else I use jpg. If this bpg is good and gets in I can use a single format, which would make things, oh I dunno, 5% easier. Arguably I could just use only png but for some reason I don't, too much converting I guess. Adding another format doesn't really do anything but it's a slow morning so might as well chime in.
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Although the comparison pages posted in this thread (this is an awesome one https://xooyoozoo.github.io/yo... ) are fun and interesting, they compare the bit efficiency of the two algorithms. That is important yes. But that isn't how these formats are used: when bandwidth is an issue (and it is to web site authors, be they individuals or companies, no matter what anyone on this thread says to the contrary), compression is increased to the threshold of perceptibility, or a little beyond. That is, the provider will increase compression until artifacts are just barely noticeable.
So, the more pertinent question, in terms of image quality, is how the two algorithms compare for equal levels of error, both in number of bits, and also in subjective image quality.
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Considering the number of images we push through the internet, a "retina"-resolution JPEG is still a factor of ten smaller than a PNG. Since many mobile plans have data caps, and many more are still forced to drop to EDGE speeds due to spotty coverage, it does play a role. Those that argue that image size does not play a role have not seen now average surfers have little to no tolerance for delays. Even speeding up the load time from three seconds to under a second is very important.
A PNG is still used a lot, though, due to its support of alpha channels. But that means they tend to be used where they can be cached. It has more or less replaced the venerable GIF for those areas where a SVG cannot (yet) be used. The old rule of thumb of choosing JPEG for photographic images and PNG for more solid colours still applies.
In this industry, there's no such thing as a "replacement," it's "just another competing format." None of the old formats ever dies, all we ever get is more new formats, all of which need to be supported, ultimately making everything more complicated. I'm not saying we shouldn't advance... but the belief that some new format you create will replace something instead of muddying the existing pool of formats is laughable. related xdcd. (yes, I know it's "standards" and not "formats," but the result is the same)
Stupid sexy Flanders.
This format will, unfortunately, probably get little traction for one reason. JPG is here and it's "good enough".
Nope -- that's not the reason. The reason is "JPEG is here and everyone archives their photos as JPEG, with no uncompressed original, particularly given that most consumer digital cameras use JPEG as their native format."
The problem for the near future is that untold petabytes of data out there exist that cannot benefit from this new format.
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A) What useful, practical, mass-market purpose is there for light-field photography?
B) Have you seen a light-field camera with any sort of decent resolution?
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I had similar thoughts.
It looked to me like running the resulting jpeg raw data through a DCT and low pass filtering the larger "block" layers might produce a similar image. I'm sure If I have nothing better to do some day I'll give it a try (i.e. I hope someone else tries it).
The first question to come to my mind is who has the patents on this animal, and how long will it be before the lawsuits begin? They'll probably wait until the new format is firmly established on the Internet before springing the "gotcha" on folks.
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a) An obvious one, CAPTCHA.
b) by the time support for it comes around there will be decent resolutions. They're at 4 megapixels with their 2nd gen camera which is sufficient for a lot of web graphics uses. I'm sure they'll hit 8-12 by gen 3.
On my site (http://thedecibelkid.com) which is relatively image-heavy I like the idea of INCREASING the image quality while using the SAME bandwidth.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
How are we going to pronounce this thing? "Bee-Peg" I suppose since "Bee-Pee-Gee" doesn't roll off the tongue.
;)
Oh come on, you literalist! You should clearly pronounce it with a soft "B".
Double the image quality for the same bandwidth. I want this format supported in all browsers yesterday already.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
.png has an alpha channel, has broad support, and uses *lossless* compression. What's not to like?
Lossless compression works terribly on photographic images, which limits the kind of images you can practically use with an alpha channel in web browsers today.
It's a soft G: "Bee-Pej".
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...of the Internet, but OSPF has strong merits of its own.
The JPEG originals from the camera are generally far too large for reasonable web use anyway. Nearly all photos you see on the web will have been downscaled and recompressed since they left the camera.
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Another great implementation for this will be images stored on smartphones. I know plenty of people who don't want to use iCloud (for good reason) that often have their phones filled quickly with music and photos. If you could halve the size of an image, you could greatly expand the usage of small hard drives on phones. Add to that the benefit of being able to send smaller images over your cell data plan and it feels like a natural fit.
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A) It's not that obvious. Care to explain how that would work? A2) That's not interesting to the end-user.
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...because jpegs are so huge to begin with :|
The BBC news site gets 40 million unique users per week and their homepage contains around 400k worth of JPEGs.
If BPG reduces the size of those images by 100k and If each of those users loads the homepage just once, that would save them 570 gigs of bandwidth per week.
Not to mention the saving for users with bandwidth caps on their connection...
WebP has lossy and lossless modes, just to clarify, and is actually a good candidate to replace JPEG, PNG and even GIF, as it also has animation.
PNG is quite old and tired at this point. Both BPG and other newly proposed formats such as WebP have lossless modes which easily beat PNG at compression.
A big problem with PNGs is that PNG editors don't try to make the smallest possible files.... you need tools like pngcrush for that.
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Oh man, you didn't get the joke... :(
It was subtle...I'll give you that. I had a whoosh going on, but caught it before I hit "send".
I agree with you about MP3/Ogg - but the Javascript decoder (used for example in http://bellard.org/bpg/gallery...) could make all the difference.
Basically it means that the server admin can reap the benefits (bandwidth) while the user has to handle the legacy conversion (Javascript runs on the user's machine). Therefore there is practically no downside for those who decide what is on a webpage.
And once this format is even just semi-widespread, browsers will start to support it too - and then it's a standard.
Precisely!!! I'd like BPG to have same capability as GIF of handling animated images: if BPG can merge GIF and JPEG properties, only then would it be bringing added value to the table. Otherwise, what's the point of conserving sizes when storage and memory are both abundant?
I'll stick with PNG.... because it's fully supported and... Oh, wait. Nevermind.
I dunno. I'm still holding out for a Xiph.org offering.
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Exactly. And because a Javascript implementation is available it works right now on every browser.
Are there any other image (not video) formats that support animated images like GIF does?
Servers always work to reduce bandwidth usage. Bandwidth is expensive when you're talking thousands of users.
Smaller images means faster transfer and faster load times, especially for mobile.
Just look at all the efforts put into bundling/compression/etc. Some companies go as far as reducing all their CSS class names to 3 or less characters. These have different purposes though not always directly related to bandwidth reduction. Bundling is more about reducing the number of HTTP requests than reducing bandwidth though, since it bundles multiple requests for CSS/JS into single request for each, because each HTTP request consumes server resources.
Usage is larger than it used to be as well. Now vast majority of people have a computer in their pocket at all times and access internet much more frequently than the age of desktops, when there was one computer per family accessed intermittently.
Many mobile data connections have lower bandwidth than traditional ground connections, although a few are faster.
As for as harddrives, the pervasiveness of digital cameras being on every phone in many pockets, means a tremendous increase in # pictures being taken. Storage on phones is higher $/gb than hard drives. Usually these make their way onto a server such as instagram or facebook, who each would be interested in reducing storage size, as the $/gb is high when you consider that data likely has at least two forms of redundancy.
so is it impossible to extend png to include more aggressive (but still lossless) compression?
i'm getting tired of the tower of babel.
OK, this is going to really get my goat.
Except that this test image has just a face and part of a shoulder, without any naughty bits. Not even erotic at all.
Except that everybody KNOWS that it's a cutout of some porn. You know what? That's tasteless and tacky. Years ago when I was a PhD student in computer vision (more later) I used to help supervise an image processing practical. It used Lena of course. Sooner or later someone found out and everyone had a good laugh.
Well the guys in the practical (90% of the people). The other 10% didn't seem to think i's so funny. I can't imagine why. So yes having a PlayBoy centrefold, even cropped sets completely the wrong tone. It sets the tone that it's no just male dominated but a total boy's club too.
For some reason all the other images are bland and neutral. You never see someone pointing out how good the reproduction of high frequencies on Baywach era David Hasslehof's manly chest or anything.
It's always Lena, peppers, and a few others.
It's a good test image because it catches both distortions of detail and color damage to areas with a gentle gradient.
No, it was good perhaps 15 years ago. It has a little high frequencies and a bit fo gradient. There are far beer trickier images now. There are far beer images it's easy to get hold of that are much harsher in those regards. All the massive overuse of Lena does is lead to ad-hoc reverse engineering of tha picture. Or as some wag in the field pointed out, the Lena compression algorithm: If the first bit is 0 then emit Lena, otherwise decode any remaining data as a JPEG.
If I have to see yet another buchered version of a Lena picture again in a compuer vision paper that I read or review, I seriously think I will murderize someone.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Are you fishing for traffic or something?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
As far as I can tell, a JavaScript decoder relies on XMLHttpRequest, which works only if the page and image are served from the same origin. This means you can't hotlink BPG images from another server unless that server has whitelisted your server with CORS. Watch sites switch to BPG as an anti-hotlinking measure, and watch this end up chewing up CPU time especially on mobile devices by decoding images in JavaScript rather than native code.
Yeah and if everyone gave me a penny I'd be mega rich. Just because adding them up a shitload of times and multiplying them millions makes a shitload of space doesn't negate the point that a jpg generally isn't a big file. Especially when optimised for web.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
A) It's not that obvious. Care to explain how that would work?
A2) That's not interesting to the end-user.
a) It is obvious. 3D is computationally expensive compared to 2D. An image a real person can manipulate to reveal the characters is easy for a person (given simple controls) and hard for a computer.
a2) You asked for useful, practical, mass-market - not interesting to the end user. For the latter, I can think of a million interesting uses for adding simple/quick depth to a web page without going full blown 3D/video/flash. From design tools to menus to smooth slideshow containers as a single object.
...and the downscaled, recompressed version will probably be the only version kept in the archive.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
To reduce the used bandwidth. Which is still important and paid for by organizations like Wikipedia.
As for handling animations you can use HEVC for that.
Funny you should say that...
EPS can already support this in principle.
PS decodes things in a chain, where an element of the chain consumes data, processes it and emits data. You can insert arbitrary PostScript code into the decoding chain. This has been used in the past to implement everything from better compressors to an entire raytracing engine.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
PNG is lossless and supports images with more bits per channel. Plus it has extensions to support animation.
But apparently they can't be bothered to use the remastered version with correct colors.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
But it does negate the suggestion that we shouldn't replace JPEGs with something smaller just because JPEGs are already "small"...
Looking at the comparison pages the savings is in the terms of double (30) to at the most triple bytes (150) and not anywhere near 50%. Yes the quality is better which alone might be ample reason to switch once it's supported in every major browser and image editing software.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
It is technically possible but practically impossible, for two reasons: One, it is very hard to get even backwards-compatible extensions approved for addition to PNG. See the failure of APNG for an example. Two, such a change would not really be backwards-compatible, and the files would be named "png" but would not actually open in any current PNG reader. There would thus be very little advantage of adding this to PNG rather than creating a new format.
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.
Well, within epsilon of exclusively..
Remember that in many emerging markets, Blackberry is the way most of the population access the web.
Cool. A time traveler. What year are you from?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes, the hard part is getting adoption. Just look how far Google's WebP image format has gotten. Or not gotten. (I'm not talking about their WebM video format which has also not gotten a lot of traction). Looks like they unveiled it in 2010 or before, but nobody has used it as far as I can see.
Is BPG using some form of VQ (vector quantization)? What are the key tech improvements over JPEG?
About that "small" Javascript decoder. Did you look at it?
You call that "small" ?
The x86 assembly code is somewhat troublesome, also.
Need Mercedes parts ?
The past is like a foreign country, and often, a foreign country is like the past.
looks like another way to sell you everything once again that you already have. I am on constant guard against that sort of thing. you can't have my Ampex 601, cold dead hands or not!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
We should replace jpgs with these bpgs because they offer transparency too. Save messing with png or gif or whatever and just have one filetype that does everything. The actual size is moot it most cases when we're talking KB in relation to GB.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Alpha channel is big advantage (worth it in its own IMHO), but even a small size decrease adds up to a lot of bandwidth for high traffic sites, especially any with a lot of image content.
In the past I would have written this off as great but stands no chance of ever being used.
Then I looked at html code just a simple ..IMG SRC="...bpg".. thing and javascript include up at the top.
The one problem preventing new significantly better formats from catching on and being deployed in the field is now gone... I can imagine at some point browser vendors ending up adding native support just for the sake of saving a few CPU cycles.
Add to that, it's relatively easy to wrap your images in a noscript tag referencing a JPG version, so for the cost of storing two versions of the image on the server, you get to save money on bandwidth for anyone whose client can support it and not degrade the user experience for people who can't.
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Um... would you like a beer, perchance?
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Exactly correct answer. Merge JPEG-BPG-> JPG
NEXT.
Women's magazines are filled with pictures of women, not men, not even cats. A beautiful woman is the universal image, I think even gay men like them. Only subhuman trolls are offended
+2
Great post
But what is the Weissman score?
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
Does that mean, no need pay patent licensing fees again to display .bpg images on your mobile device?
Just uncropped the image, definitely pron. Also, what's up with pictures of women being OK at all. I mean WE ALL KNOW that they are naked under those clothes, it's disgusting.
X
An excellent discussion and I learned a couple of things.
I will continue to use .png for archival needs where bandwidth issues do not apply, and I can avoid worrying about the copy-of-copy degradation of .jpg without the excessive size of .tiff or other lossless formats. I will convert to .jpg at as high compression as is workable when preparing images for the web.
This leads to another question, now that several persons who know something about this stuff are gathered together on this one thread:
Blender can work with images from a number of different sources and these can be stored within the .blend database. These might be reference images during modeling or textures used in the finished product. They are usualy the major contributor to the size of the .blend file. So, does anyone know whether there would be an advantage to using one image format over another when working with Blender?
Will
There is nothing technically special about the Lena SÃderberg image. It's not colors or gradients or moire patterns. Some people insist there are some notable detail, flat regions, shading, and texture features. It just happens to be one of the more popular early digitized images, nothing more.
Kriston
Is it any different/better than already existing PGF file format?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Artists practice drawing nudes for a good reason: the human eye is exquisitely sensitive to the normal shape of the human body, so you can't draw or paint badly and not have it noticed.
Of course, we have a good evolutionary reason for having developed this proficiency, along with a taste for keeping this proficiency in good working order.
Porn doesn't happen until the rest of the brain takes a holiday (our visual sub-system is by far our biggest neurological subsystem according to a Levitin book I read recently). Big chunks of the human brain taking a poorly planned vacation is endemic to the human condition. That's why I keep a list of twenty different types of cognitive porn, only one of which involves obsessing over the female body. I'm pretty sure "PC porn" must be on my list somewhere.
If you have to send more data (bigger files), you need more servers. A single server can only handle a certain maximum amount of data transfer, right? I thought that was pretty obvious, but maybe I'm missing something?
My bad - I meant to say BNG, not PNG in the first paragraph.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
When you can store hundreds and hundreds of GBs of data really cheaply, who cares about a slight saving in file size for their gentleman's fine art collection?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There already is lossy compression in PNG: converting a photo to indexed mode.
Yet now Microsoft, king of MPAA panderers, even supports the MKV format in its products going forward (including Xbone and Windows 10) because piracy is so rampant that there's a huge demand for that format
Are you sure it wasn't to allow the use of WebM, which uses a profile of MKV as its container?
Um... would you like a beer, perchance?
yes, but I would also like a better T key without the junk stuck under it :(
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I wonder how much of Matplotlib's use of this portrait relates to Playboy's copyright in the pic of Lena. The US Government always puts its works made for hire, such as the Navy portrait of Rear Admiral Hopper, in the public domain.
APNG. Supported out of the box in Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In reality you'd still have seen images compressed to hell, like Facebook does today. They would have just done it with fewer bytes.
Sexist? Hrm. Men's magazines have pictures of nekkid wimmen. Women's magazines have pictures of nekkid wimmen.
Nope, because everyone knows it came from Playboy.
Uh, I didn't. Not until this thread, though I've seen that image before.
No, it's not in the least like blood diamonds or poaching endangered species. No one was enslaved, no creature was killed to produce that image. No population was oppressed, no species went extinct to produce that image.
Depictions of naked people, in whatever medium, do not automatically objectify all members of the person's sex. Nor does it automatically objectify the person depicted. In fact, depictions of naked people that were created specifically to elicit a sexual response still don't automatically objectify the person depicted or members of the person's sex. Whether or not a painting or photograph or sculpture or video objectifies the subject is entirely orthogonal to whether or not the subject is clothed. This is proven by the fact it is possible to objectify clothed people.
The entire American movie genre called 'horror' objectifies people, nearly all of whom are clothed. That is, in fact, a large part of what makes such movies horrifying. Photos of Nazi concentration camps objectify people. That is, in fact, a large part of what makes Nazi concentration camps horrifying.
Conversely, Playboy does not ever objectify women. The women in Playboy photos nearly always have visible faces, and are frequently looking directly at the camera. They are always in fine health, uninjured, unrestrained, and are exemplars of female human beauty. The poses (and photo retouching) used display their bodies to the best possible advantage. The poses are frequently dominant in nature, such as on top of the backs of furniture like sofas and chairs, on top of tables, on top of vehicles, and especially at the top of staircases. You will notice the preponderance of the phrase "on top"—the dominant position among all mammals, including all primates.
The uncropped photograph of Lena fits the mould precisely. There's a link to it a few posts down. I just looked at it for the first time, and it fits every single point above: she is standing (dominant), resting one knee on top of an old piece of luggage (dominant), obviously in fine health, and beautiful. Her face is visible, obviously, and she's looking directly at the camera. I am reminded of another aspect of typical Playboy photography. Articles of clothing, while not concealing her sexual attributes, are often chosen for dominance. She's wearing black leather boots with heavy heels.
In short, Playboy photos are the polar opposite of objectifying: Playboy models are depicted in positions of power, with many of the trappings thereof. Baring their sexual characteristics for a camera is an expression of their power—Playboy models are comfortable in their own skin. Comfortable and more than comfortable. Judging by the expressions on their faces, they know they are beautiful, they know they are sexually attractive, and they like being both.
Just because some lunatic social engineers say naked people are automatically objectified doesn't make it so. When you get right down to it, most objections to depictions of naked people are thinly disguised Puritanism, nothing more.
Is it possible for a depiction of a naked person to objectify the person or people of their sex? Certainly. Modern sexually explicit depictions objectify the men far more often than the women, when both are together. The pictures and videos have her name on them. They seldom have his. She makes most of the money. He doesn't. She often speaks. He doesn't. Her face is always visible. His isn't. The camera frames her, not him. He rarely looks at the camera. She often does. The poses he is required to assume are often awkward and physically painful to hold for any length of time. Hers can be as well, but not as often. He is there to showcase her. He is an accessory, a piece of furniture with a penis. Even the much-maligned cumshot is evidence of her sexual p
This is huge and will take off because there are big companies that would save a lot of money by using it. For example, WordPress.com, which hosts billions of images, does pay for their bandwidth. They have a simple plugin that compresses all uploaded images. All they have to do is change their plugin to use BPG and suddenly the billions of blogs out there using smaller images? That is the majority of their image bandwidth. And it is cut in half.
Sure both storage and bandwidth seem bloated. But on a large scale, such as WordPress.com, this could mean hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in drive space and bandwidth savings each year.
Now, DeviantArt and other image gallery companies will see the same benefit.
Then this moves to WordPress.org and the other half the bloggers on the internet start using it too.
Now that WordPress uses that image type, every consumer who right-clicks and downloads those images now needs to be able to open BPG files.
When there is money to be made or saved, a technology will take off.
By what? The fact that the nips have been flashed over. Pathetic! (the entire waste of electrons over this).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"