Always cool to see new visual compression libraries hit the scene. That said I think the hardest part isn't the math of it, but the adoption of it.
Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF. Since it's based on AV1, you'd get hardware acceleration for decoding/encoding once it starts becoming a standard, and browser support will be trivial to add once AV1 has wide support.
Compression wise AVIF is performing at about the same level as FLIF (15-25% better than webp, depending on the image), and is also royalty free. The leg it has upon FLIF is the Alliance for Open Media[1] is behind it, which is a consortium of companies including: "Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent."
I'm really excited for it and I hope it actually gets traction. It'd be lovely to have photos / screenshots / gifs all able to share a common format.
>Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF
I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg XL format with a ~20% size decrease (courtesy of the PIK project).
It's slated for standardisation within a couple of weeks, it will be very interesting to see large-scale comparisons of this codec against the likes of AVIF and HEIF.
Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF?
(Speaking as someone who's seen several open, licensing-unencumbered image/video/audio formats fail to get traction with a majority of browsers).
>Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF?
Well, it's not finalized as of yet (though it is imminent), so rate of adoption is just pure guesswork at this stage. However, things I deem necessary for a new image codec to become the next 'de facto' standard are:
royalty free
major improvements over the current de facto standards
Both AVIF and Jpeg XL tick these boxes, however Jpeg XL has another strong feature which is that it offers a lossless upgrade path for existing jpeg's with significantly improved compression as a bonus.
So you're suggesting that the advantage JPEG XL has is that it will compress existing JPEGs better than FLIF or AVIF?
Yes, it losslessly recompresses existing jpeg's into the jpeg XL format, while also making the files ~20% smaller, key point being lossless. Thus it is the 'perfect' upgrade path from jpeg which is the current lossy standard, as you will get better compression and no loss in quality when shifting to Jpeg XL.
This being a 'killer feature' of course relies on Jpeg XL being very competitive with AVIF in terms of lossy/lossless compression overall.
I'm assuming this is bidirectional? You can go back from XL to jpeg losslessly as well? If thats the case, I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where you're not correct; it'd be an utterly painless upgrade path
>You can go back from XL to jpeg losslessly as well
I don't think so, but I don't quite see the point unless you are thinking of using it as a way to archive jpeg's, but in that case there are programs specifically for that, like PackJPG, Lepton etc.
There is also a mode that only preserves the JPEG image data.