BPG Image format

The big story here is this introduces a new image file format <i>without requiring you to upgrade a browser or download a plugin</i>. Those aren&#x27;t PNGs of representative images you&#x27;re looking at - that&#x27;s BPG decoding happening in your browser.<p>So we don&#x27;t like HVEC due to patent worries? Fine, we can swap in another format and use the same technique.<p>We don&#x27;t have an I-frame format for Daala that&#x27;s finalized yet? Fine, we can use work-in-progress. The format <i>does not need to be finalized</i>. If you update it, you rebuild your images and bundle a new JavaScript decoder.<p>The ability to ship media along with a sandboxed, runnable decoder is awesome, and I&#x27;m surprised it hasn&#x27;t caught on until now. I remember Google a while back implemented their own &quot;video&quot; codec in JavaScript using JPEGs and primitive inter-frame processing, exactly because there wasn&#x27;t a universal video codec format they could use.

I was ready to pass by this post with a yawn until I saw where it was coming from: Fabrice Bellard. He&#x27;s no doubt an absolute freakin&#x27; genius. And if anybody knows about image conversion, it&#x27;s him.<p>Even the things he does just for fun are impressive. Have you ever booted up Linux inside your browser? <a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellard.org&#x2F;jslinux&#x2F;</a>

EDIT: I didn&#x27;t expect this comment to be so popular and feel like I&#x27;ve hijacked the thread a little - sorry. Feel free to continue at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706850" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8706850</a><p>I would much rather someone revived the Fractal Image format, which is now out of patent. It&#x27;s very expensive to encode, but that&#x27;s nowhere near as big a problem as it used to be. It&#x27;s very fast to decode, very small, and the files are resolution independent: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fractal_compression</a><p>I was blown away when I encountered it at PC Magazine in the 90s and it seems like it would be very responsive to the needs of today&#x27;s web.

After making a few needed tweaks to get libbpg to compile on Mac OS X, I used the compiled bpgenc binary to convert a test PNG to BPG format. I also converted the PNG to a JPEG for comparison purposes. You can see the results here:<p><a href="http://justinmayer.com/bpg-test/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;justinmayer.com&#x2F;bpg-test&#x2F;</a><p>Size of PNG before conversion: 186K<p>Size after conversion to JPEG: 52K<p>Size after conversion to BPG: 9K<p>I took the liberty of submitting a Homebrew formula, so hopefully this will soon be a quick &quot;brew install libbpg&quot; away. (^_^)<p><a href="https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/34722" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Homebrew&#x2F;homebrew&#x2F;pull&#x2F;34722</a>

Looking at the Lena pictures demo, the extremely low file size comparison at the top shows just how good .bpg is in that use case. That could make for some much lighter websites when used for less important items like image thumbnails on shopping sites, for example.<p>When the file size gets larger at the end, it looks like there might be a little loss of detail. Ideally I&#x27;d like to compare them by switching back and forth using the original image and the .bpg as Photoshop layers...

I notice the container has no ICC profile support. Trivial do add as an extension tag, but should definitely be in the first spec IMO. And if I read this correctly, extension tags are hardcoded as numbers, rather than using a tag name. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a good idea.

No doubt Fabrice is very smart. I read about his 4G base station the other day. I&#x27;d love to be a fly on the wall while he codes and thinks out these projects.<p>His accomplishments are impressive: QEMU, FFMPEG, TCC, JSLinux, the list goes on

Is there anything this guy can&#x27;t do? Seriously.<p>I have been wishing there was a JPEG equivalent with an alpha channel for like forever. That allows better compositing to arbitrary background images or patterns. Now the question is how long before browsers <i>might</i> support it natively.

There was an interesting article about Fabrice: <a href="http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-programmer/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.smartbear.com&#x2F;careers&#x2F;fabrice-bellard-portrait-o...</a><p>Does anyone know if he has a day job or does he just lock himself away and work on these interesting projects?

<i>Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue.</i><p><i>Some of the HEVC algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries</i><p>There have been some patent disputes over JPEG, but I don&#x27;t think replacing it with another possibly patented format is a good idea, even if it&#x27;s technically superior in some ways.

Why not use Daala to start from? The overlapping transform probably help especially for still images, and the patent situation is probably at least better.

This definitely looks like it compares favourably against both JPEG and PNG. The test doesn&#x27;t directly compare against JPEG-2000, JPEG XR or WebP, but the results are more convincing than any examples I&#x27;ve seen for any other formats, and the Mozilla study showed HEVC&#x27;s format did best on quality metrics.<p>I hope browser vendors take note. The patent issues are concerning, but if that can be worked around and a new spec designed, then we might just actually have a new image format for the web which really is better than what we&#x27;ve already got.

I&#x27;m not qualified to comment on BPG, but this is the first I&#x27;ve heard of Mr. Bellard. I enjoy reading works from minds of this caliber. He seems to be a model citizen for the programming community. Are there others I should know about like Fabrice?

So can anyone talk about the patent issues? I hear there are multiple holders of HVEC patents and they are willing to use them. So if you use this library, wouldn&#x27;t you be liable?<p>I&#x27;d really like to know that. Because I&#x27;d <i>really</i> like to use this.

I&#x27;ve tried it with a picture of mine. The encoding process was painfully slow, but I guess that does not concern the end-user much. The file size went from 1.2M in jepg to 164K in bpg, and the decoding was fairly fast. After turning the image back into PNG the quality seemed OK but that&#x27;s tough to assess objectively.<p>The coolest thing is this javascript program that can decode and display the pictures on-the-fly.<p>Definitely an image format that could save storage space and bandwith, IMHO.

Wow, I didn&#x27;t even know there were open-source HEVC encoders. I thought there were patent issues. Now I&#x27;m off to re-encode my bluray collection!

Few questions and thoughts on top of my head.<p>1. Why a Subset of HEVC Still Picture Profile? Why not just a use HEVC Picture instead?<p>2. Since JS sources are readable and being interpreted by VM ( Free Speech ), patents issues should not be a problem?<p>3. I am assuming the quality of BGP still has Lots and Lots improvement to be made? Since all H.265 encoder hasn&#x27;t had the time to be tuned. ( Compared to x264 )

I guess the JS is just for proof of concept until support is shipped with browsers etc, but it isn&#x27;t rendering properly in the stock Android browser (4.2.2).<p>It gets to Lena&#x27;s head in the first image, then becomes brigtly multi-coloured, though it looks like the difference between colours right... as if maybe an int overflow in the browser&#x27;s JS implementation?

holy crap, check this out: <a href="http://img1.buyersbestfriend.com/mkg/snackspage/images/bpg.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;img1.buyersbestfriend.com&#x2F;mkg&#x2F;snackspage&#x2F;images&#x2F;bpg.h...</a><p>186,967 ==&gt; 29,872 and indistinguishable, 6.25:1<p>(and pls tell me if it breaks on your browser - I want to push this live!!!)<p>adam

I would guess, that decoding speed can become an issue for websites, where many images are already in the cache but are re-displayed rather often...<p>I write this, because I am building such an application and for now it has many PNGs ... and yes, using a format like BPG would be fine, because I use the PNGs only because of transparency ... but when redisplay is done via a Java Script, I doubt that I could have the same speed. Loading is not so much a limiting factor, since after some time, all relevant PNGs are already in the browser cache.<p>Can anybody say something to this topic?<p>Of course, it would be great to have this integrated into the mayor browsers soon ...

Don&#x27;t we already have WebP?

This is the guy behind Tiny C Compiler, jslinux.org (running Linux in JavaScript in the browser) and Qemu. (And several other interesting projects). This alone makes me have great faith in BPG.

Impressive! Right now it requires a .js decoder, of 75kb.<p>Assuming a fast C++ decoder instead,(possibly GPU accelerated if the decoding algorithm is well suited for it) and not using JS but what would be the rendering times?<p>PNG are 4x bigger in his experiments, but interlaced PNG makes it more pleasant to users since it can be rendered progressively, can BPG benefit from such a thing?<p>edit: Interlacing is also used in JPEG, isn&#x27;t it ?<p>It&#x27;s a tradeoff, as a user, it&#x27;s obvisouly a win situation when we have a low bandwidth, and as a server it&#x27;s obviously a win.

I think we crashed the site. Coral Cache has the front page, at least: <a href="http://bellard.org.nyud.net/bpg/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellard.org.nyud.net&#x2F;bpg&#x2F;</a>

Unfortunately, a lot of what I do with images is constrained by what can be losslessly embedded in a PDF. Even if no influential organisation is opposed to BPG it will take at least 3 years, I would guess, for BPG to become part of the PDF standard, and then another year or so for it to become reasonable to expect people to have PDF readers that can handle it. However, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised to see BPG being widely used in 2020.

How does it compare to WebP? Also, how you measures lossy image quality? What are the metrics? I hope it&#x27;s not just by looking at result and judging.

Does anyone know what percentage of traffic is JPG&#x2F;PNG? My curiosity wants to try to put a dollar-value on the potential global bandwidth savings.

Pronounced &#x27;bee-peg&#x27;?

How many &quot;better JPEGs&quot; have been created now, without significantly displacing JPEG&#x27;s market share?

This worked awesome on my MacBook and my PC, but I am getting some massive rendering errors in Safari on my iPad 3: <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18855215/bpg.PNG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.dropboxusercontent.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;18855215&#x2F;bpg.PNG</a>

I really dig it, but I&#x27;m not yet familiar with BPG. It seems that decoding it would take more processing power, and potentially be slower than JPG. Is this the case? Under the &quot;performance&quot; section, decoding speed was not mentioned.

Looks like the JS decoder is compiled using emscripten, very nice.

Very out of topic but, is lena.jpg still acceptable? I mean, tech industry is getting better at inclusion but come on, are we still using that crop from Playboy?

The best coders seem to have the simplest websites.

Has anyone installed the bpg encoder bpg-0.9.2-win32 on a windows 7 machine, and if so how did you do it?

Looks like his site is down, too much HN traffic.

I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it&#x27;s time to move on. It&#x27;s fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren&#x27;t welcome in this field. I wish Fabrice Bellard would have left them out of the demo set.<p>Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see a demo in the browser without built-in support, but leave it to the man who put Linux in the browser to write a decoder in javascript. This is an encouraging project.

Bellard is a genius.

Fabrice Bellard strikes again!

&gt; Supported by most Web browsers with a small Javascript decoder<p>Well, so much for that. Executing code in order to view an image is just begging to be exploited…

The results only show marginal improvement.<p>What&#x27;s needed is a compression method that doesn&#x27;t introduce artifacts on hard edges, as JPEG does, but is otherwise no worse at compression than JPEG. Then we wouldn&#x27;t need to do some things in JPEG and others in PNG, and we&#x27;d be spared the pain of JPEG screenshots. Much better results on the Tecnick image set (which is mostly hard edges) would indicate one had been found. The results only indicate modest improvement in that area.