New Mozilla Encoder Improves JPEG Compression 155
jlp2097 writes "As reported by Heise, Mozilla has introduced a new JPEG encoder (German [Google-translated to English]) called mozjpeg. Mozjpeg promises to be a 'production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders.' The Mozilla Research blog states that Mozjpeg is based on libjpeg-turbo with functionality added from jpgcrush. They claim an average of 2-6% of additional compression for files encoded with libjpeg and 10% additional compression for a sample of 1500 jpegs from Wikipedia — while maintaining the same image quality."
Re:Why aren't we using PNG? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why aren't we using PNG? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seem Negligible (Score:5, Informative)
Slightly better? For full color photographs, PNG is *much* bigger. Anyone that's serving up a lot of images to users cares because of bandwidth and storage costs.
I picked a random Wikipedia image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
The 1200x900 JPG is around 300KB. I converted to PNG with Gimp, and the resulting file was 1.7MB - almost 6 times larger. The Filesize after converting with Imagemagick was about the same.
For completeness, I took a 94MB full color 6496x4872 TIFF and converted it to PNG (compressionlevel=9) and got a 64MB file. Then compressed the same TIFF to JPG (Quality=90), and got a 7MB file.
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Informative)
General image software support is poor for both.
Re:I wish they would focus on WebP instead (Score:3, Informative)
The resistance [mozilla.org] to support WebP [google.com] in Mozilla seems to be more politically motivated than technical.
AMEN!!!! WebP is modern. JPEG, GIF and PNG are all older than most pop stars. Why do we use the image compression equivalent of MPEG1 still?
Seriously, this is so dumb. I continue using Firefox for two specific reasons (tagged bookmarks and Pentadactyl) but Vimperator and Pocket are making Chrome more tempting. I choose WebP (using the official encoder I build directly from Google's repository) for my online photo storage. Decades of photos and scans I would estimate occupy about 1/8th the space of JPEG with little perceptual difference. WebP really shines on very clean, noise-free images and occasionally I'll have 5 megapixel images compress down to under 200kb (variable block compression, it's the 21st century.
Few points about WebP. It might be nice for Google to fix encoder crashes with extremely large images, and maybe improve that GIF2WEB converter.
It is nice that Google provides an installer that makes Windows transparently handle WebP. Would love to see better support for it in KDE apps.
Webp is amazing (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed, it's a much better choice. I actually converted my entire image library to .webp, and I use Irfanview to view the images. The filesize savings were huge, with no visible reduction in quality.
Some examples:
4.5 MB JPG -> 109 KB webp
3.66 MB JPG -> 272 KB webp
3.36 MB JPG -> 371 KB webp
One folder of mixed JPGs and PNGs with a total of 169 MBs was converted to webp. the total size of all contents of the folder ("directory", whatever you want to call it) was 6.44 MBs. I was so impressed that I kept records of the results.
Not only would this be HUGE for sites like Wikipedia, but it also significantly decreased the amount of space that I was using in my cloud storage account.
Honestly for all of their PR about a better, more open web, all we really get is the same old politics and attempts at controlling what is and is not the standards. They still behave like children. Mozilla, Google, I'm not taking sides. They're both at fault.