Slashdot Mirror
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.
Because the new half-the-size JPEG files wouldn't work with old JPEG editors/viewers.
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...
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).
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.
But JPEG2000 was absolutely crawling with patents like maggots and worms writhing through the very core of its being. If that didn't put everyone off then I don't know what would? Certainly ruined my lunch.
DJVU was another contender but it just happened to be tagged on to a PDF-like docuemnt format and not widely known as just an image format.
Finally, anything that was not (properly) supported by Internet Explorer ten years ago was a dead duck. And Microsoft and Apple actively snub any open format if they can get away with (like Vorbis, WebM etc).
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I don't think we should compare BPG with JPEG, since it is very outdated.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!