What does HackerNews think of pik?
A new lossy/lossless image format for photos and the internet
To understand that article required me searching for FUIF [1], PIK [2] and a brief explanation of what JPEG XL is trying to achieve.
I double down on my "complaint" - I'd call it constructive criticism - that article was poorly written. It's actually quite a good story that their Free Universal Image Format (FUIF) has achieved what it has. That's a great acronym, especially for a world that thinks JPEG XL is a good acronym! Why not put in in the article.
To save anyone else time:
[1] https://github.com/cloudinary/fuif [2] https://github.com/google/pik
FLIF & FUIF were created by Jon Sneyers - http://sneyers.info/ and are lossless but progressive, generating better resulting images at every step of the image download and brilliant mobile support (your browser can just stop downloading the image once it reaches the quality sufficient for the viewport).
A new update on the JPEG XL is worth reading:
--> https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...
[0] http://flif.info/ -- superseded by FUIF
[1] https://cloudinary.com/blog/fuif_new_legacy_friendly_image_f... -- FLIF is lossless and amazing, in part absorbed by JPEG XL
[2] https://github.com/google/pik - from Google, got absorbed by JPEG XL
[3] https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...
Background: JPEG XL is a combination of Cloudinary's FUIF [1] (successor of FLIF [2]) and Google's Pik [3].
Committee Draft (Aug 2019): https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03565
Technical Details: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...
Features / Goals:
- high quality compression (> 60% over JPEG-1)
- royalty-free with open source implementations available from the start
- versatile: supports alpha transparency, high bit depth (16-bit), lossless compression, animations
- progressive decoding / "responsive by design"
- legacy-friendly: reversible transcoding of JPEGs with 22% size reduction (demo available [4])
Comparisons:
- JPEG 2000, JPEG XR: only marginal compression improvements
- WebP: limited (8-bit, 4:2:0), no progressive decoding
- BPG/HEIF (HEVC): patent-encumbered (not royalty-free), no progressive decoding, complex
- AVIF (AV1): no progressive decoding, complex, slow?
[1] https://cloudinary.com/blog/introducing_fuif_responsive_imag...
Webp is royalty free, but for lossy compression it's not a good enough improvement (imo) over jpeg for it to replace it. For lossless compression though, it beats PNG both in size and compression/decompression speed by a good margin.
As for potential jpeg replacements, we have AVIF which is like BGP,HEIF but with the royalty free AV1 codec: https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/
And the other one I find very interesting is PIK, which is a new lossy/lossless codec that is supposedly a good improvement over jpeg while being very fast, and also has the feature of being able to losslessly recompress jpeg images into pik with ~20% compression: https://github.com/google/pik
Its lossy part is being developed by Google PIK team ( https://github.com/google/pik ) + Jon Sneyers (author of FLIF) – some details: https://encode.ru/threads/3108-Google-s-compression-proje%D1... https://encode.ru/threads/2793-PIK-image-format