This conversation showed up a couple of weeks ago...
Any new "image compression format" isn't going to gain widespread traction unless is can displace JPEG in terms of hardware support and ubiquity in cameras.
I was part of the JPEG-2000 support. The company I was with at the time had technology around how blocks were encoded (it gave up block independence at the benefit of 20+% encoding efficiency -- downside would be an intermediary step to reconstruct the JPEG steam).
None of those solutions took off.
Explain to me how beyond a hobbyist market BPG will make a splash?
It’ll make a splash if (0) the legal issues are sufficiently sorted out so that adopters don’t feel threatened using the format (1) the polyfill works everywhere, as it seems to, without too substantial a slowdown, (2) it saves enough bandwidth that major websites start sending BPG instead of JPG to at least some web clients, (3) one or more major browsers decide to build in native support, and maybe an extra boost (4) it manages to support use cases that other formats don’t handle well (e.g. photographic/naturalistic images with full alpha channel) and carves out a niche as the main format for those particular types of images.
I can imagine Safari and IE building support for this format entirely as a counter to Google’s WebP, since they already need support for HEVC as a matter of course.
Many current websites send very heavily compressed JPEG images to save bandwidth, and just live with the big hit to image quality. If they had a similar-filesize alternative that they could use for some or all clients that didn’t degrade image quality, and still was guaranteed to work smoothly, it’s plausible they might adopt it.
Nobody will reencode anything in photo sites. Just newer content will be supported.
As for FB, their internal re-compression of jpegs is annoying as hell. Fine details taken with D750 become blocky almost cell phone quality images. Solution? Upload PNG.
JPEG 2000 is an actual standard but to get it working you need to license a decoder from someone or build a new one, you can’t just piggyback on some existing HEVC decoder. JPEG 2000 doesn’t currently work in every browser, and there have been at least a couple of security vulnerabilities in the decoder (Kakadu I think?) that OS X ships by default and enables for Safari. In many cases where there’s no native browser or direct plugin support you can get it working with a slow, buggy, resource-hogging Flash implementation, but I’ve had pretty poor experience as a user on sites that incorporate one. I don’t believe there are any pure-Javascript implementations.
As far as I can tell, this new format already has a better client compatibility story than JPEG 2000 right off the bat, as well as better quality for the same file sizes.
> Any new "image compression format" isn't going to gain widespread traction unless is can displace JPEG in terms of hardware support and ubiquity in cameras.
I believe part of the point of BPG is that it's an HEVC subset. If cameras can shoot HVEC, they have BGP hardware support.
Any new "image compression format" isn't going to gain widespread traction unless is can displace JPEG in terms of hardware support and ubiquity in cameras.
I was part of the JPEG-2000 support. The company I was with at the time had technology around how blocks were encoded (it gave up block independence at the benefit of 20+% encoding efficiency -- downside would be an intermediary step to reconstruct the JPEG steam).
None of those solutions took off.
Explain to me how beyond a hobbyist market BPG will make a splash?