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Google Releases Open Source 'Guetzli' JPEG Encoder (betanews.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the hassle-free dept.

BrianFagioli writes: Today, Google released yet another open source project. Called "Guetzli," it is a JPEG encoder that aims to produce even smaller image file sizes. In fact, the search giant claims a whopping 35 percent improvement over existing JPEG compression. If you are wondering why smaller file sizes are important, it is quite simple -- the web. If websites can embed smaller images, users can experience faster load times while using less data. While Google didn't aim to improve JPEG image quality with Guetzli, it seems it has arguably done so. It is subjective, but the search giant surveyed human beings and found they preferred Google's open source offering 75 percent of the time. Smaller file sizes and better image quality? Wow! Google has done something amazing here.

6 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Know how else users can get faster load times? by Red_Chaos1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    By websites not have 20 tracking pixel GIFs, 50 different ad servers, 5 different CDNs, 10 tracking servers, and a partridge in a pear tree. Websites are built fucking stupid these days, too much shit relies on too many other sources to work correctly and if even one doesn't respond in a timely manner, the whole thing stalls.

  2. Re:Will probably also be useful for video keyframe by cheater512 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Until you read the bit about it needing 300mb of ram per megapixel of input data.

    I don't think we'll see any hardware encoders being able to implement the algorithm any time soon.
    And certainly not running in realtime on a CPU.

  3. Re:BFD by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Last time I checked JavaScript was transferred in character format, not binary

    You can send it as binary - use HTTP compression. I believe most webservers support it as do webbrowsers, so the javascript file is compressed and the compressed binary is sent over the wires, and the web browser will decompress the blob back to the original javascript.

  4. Re:Weak statistics by radarskiy · · Score: 5, Informative

    At a 95% confidence level, a sample of 23 will give you a range of +/-18% on that 75% result (57%-93%). At 99% confidence level, the range is +/-23%. We can be pretty confident that more will prefer the Google result than not.

  5. Guetzli means Cookie in Swiss German by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just so you know

  6. Re: survey by Sivaraj · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know what the survey compared it to. But I did a quick test with the same result.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (a resized version was used)

    Input Image: ../zayapa.jpg JPEG 1608x949 1608x949+0+0 8-bit sRGB 1.097MB 0.000u 0:00.000
    Output Image: zayapa.jpg[1] JPEG 1608x949 1608x949+0+0 8-bit sRGB 641KB 0.000u 0:00.000

    Only "gotcha" is:

    $ time guetzli ../zayapa.jpg zayapa.jpg

    real 5m39.725s
    user 5m35.340s
    sys 0m4.188s

    It is a relatively low-end Pentium processor, but still over 5 minutes to compress a 1MB image is too high.