libavif VS guetzli

It's 2023, surely this is not yet another bug related to memory unsafety that could be avoided if we'd stop writing critical code that deals with extremely complex untrusted input (media codecs) in memory unsafe languages?

Yep, of course it is: https://github.com/webmproject/libwebp/commit/902bc919033134...

I guess libwebp could be excused as it was started when there were no alternatives, but even for new projects today we're still committing the same mistake[1][2][3].

[1] -- https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d

[2] -- https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

[3] -- https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libiamf

Yep. Keep writing these in C; surely nothing will go wrong.

As far as I understand you are talking about this plugin. I don't know c++ and half of the code was like a black magic, but if I get it correctly, it encodes your images with libavif, and adds custom metadata ([solar/time of day] -> json -> base64).

So a few dozen comments, but so far it doesn't look like any mention the immediate thing that jumped out at me which was the claims vs AVIF:

>"In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format."

Huh? I'll admit I haven't been following codecs as super ultra closely as I used to, but I thought AOM was a pretty broad coalition of varying interests and AV1 an open, royalty free codec that was plenty open source friendly? I've heard plenty of reasonable arguments that JPEG XL has some real technical advantages over AVIF and as well as superior performance is much more feature rich and scalable. So I could see people being bummed for that. But this is the first time I've heard the assertion that it's somehow a Google project? I mean, AOM's libavif reference is BSD too [0]? I'd love some more details on that from anyone who has been following this more closely. I can even understand if AOM isn't as community friendly and an accusation that it's dominated by big corps, but in that case why single out Google alone? From wiki:

>The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent.

Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too.

----

0: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

> You have a good point that AVIF layered image items can act like such P/B-frames. Do libavif (or other AVIF implementations if any) make use of them?

Seemingly. As search for "libavif progressive encoding" shows several issues about this, and a search for "progressive" in https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/blob/main/include/av... shows an enum for avifProgressiveState, appears to show support for it.

I mean, it already has it: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/commit/570c42c2c10a878c8cc896f1c5daf1a955274142

Apart from mpv and ffplay, the only software I currently have installed that can play animated AVIF is Chromium. And from what I've read from this libavif bug report, I'm not sure if looping animated files in general is something that's just done by default by a lot of software regardless of whether the file is marked as a loop or not.

The support for progressive AVIF decoding has landed in libavif and in Chromium. But are there any docs on how to create and test progressive AVIF images?

The "for example" is the key here, because AVIF does support multi-layer coding per the spec now (though not currently implemented in libavif from what I can tell).

libavif is at version 0.11.1, see https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/tags

JPEGLI = A small JPEG

The suffix -li is used in Swiss German dialects. It forms a diminutive of the root word, by adding -li to the end of the root word to convey the smallness of the object and to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment.

This obviously comes out of Google Zürich.

Other notable Google projects using Swiss German:

https://github.com/google/gipfeli high-speed compression

Gipfeli = Croissant

https://github.com/google/guetzli perceptual JPEG encoder

Guetzli = Cookie

https://github.com/weggli-rs/weggli semantic search tool

Weggli = Bread roll

https://github.com/google/brotli lossless compression

Brötli = Small bread

A JPEG encoder developed by Jyrki Alakujala, Robert Obryk, and Zoltán Szabadka, and released by Google in 2017. Guetzli specializes in high-end image quality where it is claimed to produce significantly smaller files than prior encoders at equivalent quality, albeit at very low speed. It is named after the Swiss German expression for biscuits, in line with the names of other compression technology from Google. github.com/google/guetzli

I'm a huge fan of AV1 for video, but for images JPEG-XL is simply the better codec than AVIF. If you've not actually looked closely at a comparison and are just on the side of AVIF in this debate because it's based on AV1 (and maybe you hate HEVC / HEIC), I'd urge you to look closer. Jpeg XL is pretty unrelated to Jpeg, Jpeg 2000 and Jpeg XR and instead a successor of Google Guetzli, FLIF and newer research.

I've never had much luck using jpegoptim. In most cases it's only removing the metadata, which isn't much on high-res files.

Guetzli is nice, if you don't have too many images to recompress (quite slow): https://github.com/google/guetzli

If you're going for full re-encoding, it might help to decode the current JPEG with https://github.com/google/knusperli ... but if you re-JPEG that you might have second-order artifacts. Give it a try. Then compress with https://github.com/google/guetzli

You know. I was actually quite annoyed ( to say the least ) with the post. For one the post is lacking a date, and you have to search yourself it was published in April 2017. And without a date the article is completely lacking context because Guetzli [1] hasn't been worked on for 5 years. And as [2] mentioned its work and derivative was ultimately merged into JPEG XL, which is a very decent image format. ( People should definitely check out JPEG XL if it is not on your radar yet )

But then I notice it was Dan luu who submitted it, which likely means there must be something much deeper than is what is shown on the surface. So what is the context here ?

[1] https://github.com/google/guetzli

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30622303