from Hacker News

Google Chrome Is Already Preparing to Deprecate JPEG-XL

by smitop on 10/29/22, 1:31 PM with 20 comments

• by anonova on 10/29/22, 2:46 PM

  I wouldn't be surprised if this is more a legal issue since Microsoft was granted a patent on rANS encoding, which is used in JPEG-XL: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

• by Scaevolus on 10/29/22, 9:52 PM

  As funny as this is, I don't think this is true.

  I _think_ for policy reasons all of Chromes experimental flags have deprecation deadlines to ensure they it doesn't accumulate endless flags that eventually break. These deadlines can be moved.

  Just search the jxl issue for "expiry", they've bumped it a few times already: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...

• by pornel on 10/29/22, 4:08 PM

  With AV1 video and AVIF browsers got buy-1-get-1-free deal. The video codec was a necessity, and decoding one frame from a slightly different flavor of MP4 container is a relatively minor addition.

  AVIF is not as good as JPEG XL, but it's good enough to the point JXL is a nice to have rather than a burning need. For the same reason I don't expect WebP2 to go anywhere unless Google is willing to make it a compatibility headache for other vendors.

• by ksec on 10/29/22, 3:17 PM

  Like I said before,

  For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG XL is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, truly patent free, and at 128 or 160+kbps, it is within 10% Bitrate difference compared to state of the art codec.

  And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.