Comment by miladyincontrol

Comment by miladyincontrol a day ago

3 replies

Yes AVIF is better at compressing than jpeg and even webp, that should be taken for granted given its a newer format. But no its not remotely competitive with JXL, the only benchmarks it trades blows are ones with laughably low quality settings beyond what any user would ever use. Real world usage paints a very different picture.

JXL not only has better compression rates at equivalent qualities for sane settings, it does so with faster encoding and decoding, while also supporting progressive decoding leveraging image saliency.

AV2 might bring it closer on par with JXL in compression but to suggest they're at all equal is a joke.

CharlesW a day ago

> Yes AVIF is better at compressing than jpeg and even webp, that should be taken for granted given its a newer format.

Yes, and it turns out that "somewhat better compression efficiency" basically doesn't matter. The ecosystem matters a lot, though — Apple's support of JXL in ProRAW moved the needle 1,000× more than whatever efficiency advantages JXL may have.

A couple ecosystem challenges for JXL that I see is that (1) it has no video story and (2) it's five years behind AV1 in terms of having a hardware encode/decode story (I'm assuming it will have one), and by that time it'll be competing with AV2.

> AV2 might bring it closer on par with JXL in compression but to suggest they're at all equal is a joke.

They're apples and oranges, which is part of my frustration about the post we're discussing. The industry has clearly aligned behind AV1 as a universal, open, royalty-free image/video distribution format, and is now working on version 2 (AV2). That all happens regardless of JXL's fortunes.

I firmly believe that JXL will find "conscious success" as an authoring and intermediate file format, but that makes it more of a TIFF competitor. For distribution, JXL's "unconscious success" as a distribution format looks like another output format for Cloudflare Images, Cloudinary, Fastly Image Optimizer, etc.

theandrewbailey a day ago

> But no its not remotely competitive with JXL, the only benchmarks it trades blows are ones with laughably low quality settings beyond what any user would ever use.

At 1080p, a 100k AVIF image is good enough to serve on a webpage. The same image as a 100k JXL will (probably) look unacceptible.

Source: every year or so, I compile the latest encoders and play around with encoding my blog's images with AVIF and JXL. Smaller AVIF images look ok, but the equivalently sized JXL images look way worse, so I gladly serve AVIF. (And before you accuse me of re-encoding lossy to lossy images, most images I test with are game screenshots stored as PNGs.)